#1
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: +
https://np.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/6a67si/a_million_in_medical_debt_should_i_just_declare/

I'm 28 years old. I spent three weeks in ICU with pneumonia and came out with over a million in medical debt. There is no realistic way I will ever be able to pay this off. My credit is already shot from other medical bills, I have no assets to pay off a creditor. No home (I live on my friend's sofa) no car or money in the bank account and I was fired due to said hospitalization. At least I have no credit card debt and no student loans. Should I declare bankruptcy? If so, do I need a lawyer? Obviously money is an issue but filing myself feels like a nightmare waiting to happen.

#2
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#3
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Whenever I hear about stuff like this, about how medical bankruptcy is the #1 reason for bankruptcy, I always think about the meetings, powerpoints, phonecalls, conferences, etc that the executives, accountants, lawyers, etc from the hospitals and insurance companies take part of. Because this is a regular occurrence. They have to account for all of this. Bankruptcy, debts, tears, death. You gotta wonder about all these people that are so blase about patients losing everything because they got sick.
#4
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looks like the usa medical system is working exactly as it was designed to
#5
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could someone smart learn me if yanquis paying for medical treatment in cuba (or more generally imperialist citizens getting healthcare in 3rd world) is a good thing for the global south

eg if paying the dollar cost of medical treatment + X above that in reparations is less than what youd pay your imperial medical system then is that an ok interaction?
#6
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#8
Post rating: +

hey posted:

Whenever I hear about stuff like this, about how medical bankruptcy is the #1 reason for bankruptcy, I always think about the meetings, powerpoints, phonecalls, conferences, etc that the executives, accountants, lawyers, etc from the hospitals and insurance companies take part of. Because this is a regular occurrence. They have to account for all of this. Bankruptcy, debts, tears, death. You gotta wonder about all these people that are so blase about patients losing everything because they got sick.



That's why the have the charity wings that forgive some small fraction of medical debt… The "point" of those operations is not to help the people who have no ability to pay, it's to alleviate guilt for the people running everything

#9
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#12
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swampman posted:

is there something particularly "wrong" with the usa medical system?


did we get an answer to this?

#13
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tears posted:

swampman posted:

is there something particularly "wrong" with the usa medical system?

did we get an answer to this?



Normally what happens if a person has to go to an OON hospital in an emergency situation (in which case it's the duty of the patient to do the admission notification, not the hospital- it's in the fine print that you didn't read of your policy), is the insurance will have the patient transferred to an in-network facility as soon as they're medically stable, and if they're nice or the member appeals might pay the bills before that time to charge. However OP is likely out of luck if s/he never notified and stayed after medically stable; insurance will likely be unsympathetic. It's not fair to the other subscribers if OP presents a million dollar bill if it was medically possible to be treated for $100,000 at an INN facility after a $1000 hospital to hospital ambulance transfer.


#14
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americans being bankrupted and their lives ruined by other americans sounds pretty good to me. good to know that they aren't exclusively destroying other nations but also themselves. equality for all nations imo
#15
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#16
UNUSUALY COOL
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that person should flee to another country imo
#17
UNUSUALY COOL
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Synergy posted:

Normally what happens if a person has to go to an OON hospital in an emergency situation (in which case it's the duty of the patient to do the admission notification, not the hospital- it's in the fine print that you didn't read of your policy), is the insurance will have the patient transferred to an in-network facility as soon as they're medically stable, and if they're nice or the member appeals might pay the bills before that time to charge. However OP is likely out of luck if s/he never notified and stayed after medically stable; insurance will likely be unsympathetic. It's not fair to the other subscribers if OP presents a million dollar bill if it was medically possible to be treated for $100,000 at an INN facility after a $1000 hospital to hospital ambulance transfer.




this is extra fucked because of the big financial/cost incentives for a lot of people with insurance choices through their employer to go with EPO (exclusive provider) plans where there is no out-of-network coverage whatsoever, and all those plans say they cover emergency care as though it's in-network, but really what they do is deny those claims instantly and drag the person, who is likely recovering from a major or critical injury, through a lengthy process of justifying every single thing that was done and every single second they spent out-of-network. People's ability to manage this bad-faith bullshit has an inverse relationship to their needs, for obvious reasons.

There's also the wonderful bait-and-switch, given how certain specialists in the U.S. such as psychiatrists and clinical psych therapists are deserting health-plan networks en masse, where the insurance company presents their prey with a massive list of such providers "in-network" to entice the victim to sign on to an EPO, and then when they do, whoops ha ha that list mostly contains providers who aren't in the network anymore, are in-network but can't take new patients because they took all the former patients of the nearby providers who left, or are in-network right now but won't be within a couple months as they note all their colleagues deserting every company's network. The plan managers also provide phone lines to "help" customers find providers, where the help consists of someone on the other end of the phone line going onto the same Web site the customer can access and rattling off the first page of names/phone numbers they find, which again will mostly consist of people who either aren't in the network anymore or won't treat the customer, and of course the metrics for the help line operators dictate their main goal as getting callers to hang up quickly.

#18
UNUSUALY COOL
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Basically even within the confines of contracts under capitalism, health insurance in the U.S. is extraordinarily crooked and screwed with no enforcement whatsoever. It's as bad as the housing debt market was revealed to be in 2007-2008.

There is no chance of a public option or a single-payer system working in the United States because of the campaign-contribution & lobbying clout that allows private insurers to behave in this manner, not even to the extent those systems work in other Western countries where health care is treated as a constitutional right. Short of genuine revolution in the traditional sense it won't get fixed. The only way to solve the problem in the U.S. is to seize the machine of state, imprison Congress and outlaw private health insurance and likely private medical practice as well, so uh Communism i guess.
#19
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man it feels good to own liberals looking up to scandinavia now that almost every nordic country rolls back its social democratic reforms. were heading for a "right to choose" model here in finland aka privatization and subsidies of healthcare. give it another 10 years and we dont even need the subsidies
#20
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#21
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xipe posted:

could someone smart learn me if yanquis paying for medical treatment in cuba (or more generally imperialist citizens getting healthcare in 3rd world) is a good thing for the global south

eg if paying the dollar cost of medical treatment + X above that in reparations is less than what youd pay your imperial medical system then is that an ok interaction?



i think it'd be a really obvious and productive interaction short and medium term. american money to buy stuff wd allow for more tertiary care to develop in cuba and yanquis wouldn't have to spend decades servicing medical debt

otoh the cuban healthcare system leans heavily into pretty low tech preventive/primary care in the community while medical tourists wd be looking for mostly procedures which wd need specialists and high organic composition of capital probably. i'm just spitballing, i've not read anything serious abt cuban medicine



i'd be a bit worried abt the best and brightest or w/e encouraged to specialize into high paying procedure heavy fields like you get in america where the top students pick dermatology. but i dunno if that'd be a bad thing really

#22
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http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Cuba-Calls-for-Worldwide-Universal-Health-Care-at-WHO-Assembly-20170528-0013.html
#23
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#24
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advice to the majority of our lurkers and banned posters: please seek medical advice before quitting your antipsychotic meds.
#25
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#26
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If science isnt even real, which it isn't, it stands to reason that mental illness likely isn't real either.
#27
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AZ_IZ_OT posted:

On a more forums-critical note, however: for all the posters who've been or gone off the deep end, I've never seen any of you examine mental illness from any perspective besides "lmao take yr haldol, discipline" (wan, externalized self-reflection: will it happen to me?) or "capitalism's fault" (vulgar Marxism) and that's all just pathetically lazy.


well for the record, i meant exactly what i said about seeking medical advice before going off meds, despite the tongue-in-cheek tone. as for discussing this topic beyond the flippant remarks to which you take exception, i'm not sure what is to be gained by going much beyond foucault and maybe someone like szasz, but i sure as hell don't have the time or energy to devote to finding that out

#28
mt.real
Post rating: +
szasz hands
#29
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +

AZ_IZ_OT posted:

On a more forums-critical note, however: for all the posters who've been or gone off the deep end, I've never seen any of you examine mental illness from any perspective besides "lmao take yr haldol, discipline" (wan, externalized self-reflection: will it happen to me?) or "capitalism's fault" (vulgar Marxism)



i've posted about it a bunch from the perspective of someone who used to help people get coverage for mental health treatment though. and i did it in this thread.

#30
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i like being on ssris because i feel like im watching my life ffrom a 3rd person point of view and it makes even the little things seem really ironic, i like comming off ssris because it usually triggers a hypomanic episode

i like benzos but have completly stopped taking them because living your life wrapped in a wet blaket is actually bad, even if it feels good

i was put on antipsychotics once and that will be the only time, theyre bad but probably also good sometimes

for a long time i used to smoke a lotta lotta of weed which made me feel very very very smart and also was pushing me down the path of becoming a paranoid schizophrenic, especially when i started talking fewer and fewer benzos

i take opiates when im too overwhelmed by the world and that works really well, cos theres nothing like making everything outside of your walls literally disapear, but is also very bad for obvious reasons and i wouldnt recomend

i wouldnt trust a doctor to know shit about mental health since with the cuts to the nhs imo doctors are far more willing to hand out benzos than they used to be

thats my self reflection on mental health and the care system, drugs are bad and good, whatever
#31
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like no body ever seems to talk about how the effects of various medications produce their own "mental illnesses". walking through life on a medication that makes you feel disconected from your own body or life in general is, as far as i understand, not a normal state of being, and yet thats the effect SSRIs have on me which didnt seem to bother any doctors or whatever *shrugging*. with these sorts of medication often these changes can be subtle enough that you dont really notice whats going on, and then you eventually forget feeling any other way,
#32
Post rating: +
I took antipsychotics once and they gave me this thing called 'akathisia' so I stopped almost immediately:

Akathisia is a movement disorder characterized by a feeling of inner restlessness and a compelling need to be in constant motion, as well as by actions such as rocking while standing or sitting, lifting the feet as if marching on the spot, and crossing and uncrossing the legs while sitting. People with akathisia are unable to sit or keep still, complain of restlessness, fidget, rock from foot to foot, and pace.

It's literally a mental illness that ONLY exists because of psychiatric drugs. It does not occur in the absence of psychiatric drugs and I preferred mild psychosis to it.

E: apparently it also comes with Parkinson's sometimes
#33
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I dont have any mental illnesses. Not that it would be possible for me to have one, since they don't exist.
#34
Post rating: +++++
OP: Check it out: this guy got a one million dollar medical bill and is going to have to declare bankruptcy basically because he got a really bad cold

Post 10: I myself have used cocaine, benzos, heroin and heroin derivatives, ketamine, and that special drug they give soldiers to make them only care about jacking off. Doctors say I got depression, dry brain, immoral sadness disease, and mental rickets. They put me on a secret SSRI that on the list of side effects says "Mind Roundness," I'm in college for poly sci and if I don't like something I say it only exists because of capitalism.
#35
Deus Ex Machinist
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coke is the worst but

#36
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#38
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AZ_IZ_OT posted:

I'm not taking exception. The remarks are indicative of the silent acknowledgment that bugging the hell out is one of life's little dice rolls. And it happens to come with the potential for a complete loss of personal freedom.


it is, nonetheless, one of life's little dice rolls. life is unfair. the degree to which one potentially loses one's freedom depends a great deal more on the legal system (and implied in that is class) than it does on psychiatry as such, which frankly is more of an accomplice in case like the one you mention about your friend - if he weren't "in the community" receiving mandated injections, he would instead be locked up somewhere.

AZ_IZ_OT posted:

As for writers... I hate Foucault, and Szasz has a primarily libertarian orientation.


well there's a reason i said "maybe szasz". why do you hate foucault though? i haven't read it for ages but i thought madness and civilisation was pretty great. i mean he obviously doesn't have anything to say about the nitty gritty of psychiatric treatments but in terms of psychiatry's role in society he's kind of spot on, no?

#39
bb bourgeoisie
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Keven posted:

If science isnt even real, which it isn't, it stands to reason that mental illness likely isn't real either.



much like careers in comedy

#40
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