Quote:
Originally Posted by janmcn
Do you have any idea how those 40 million people are being treated now and who is paying for it?
|
Yes, I do. The patients are being treated:
- in the ER where they cannot be turned away (and rightly so), and where 24-hour facilities and staffing by all specialties on call is the most expensive place of all to treat people;
- by hospitals and doctors who do millions of dollars of
charity care every day because a) they care about people and b) it's more cost effective to treat for free than it is to submit the endless billings;
- by teaching hospitals' clinics staffed with manpower of doctors in training, as Medicare/Medicaid were set up long ago to do, with doctors in training working at very low wages in exchange for the government paying for most of their residency training;
- and by city and county health departments designed exactly for indigent people without insurance, and these departments are staffed by the same doctors who can afford to accept Medicaid, and fees to patients are either free or on a sliding scale according to income.
Flawed as all this is, everyone
does have access to "healthcare". Unfortunately, many people decide not to GO or apply for help, and they just use the ER as their clinic.