Austin Nesties
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Re: what is your opinion on the new healthcare bill?
This. DH has a congenital heart defect and requires routine exam, testing, and follow-up every 6 months. He's uninsurable w/o his group health plan provided by his employer. We are so thankful that he is "over covered". Without his great coverage, his last exam, testing, heart cath, and follow-ups would have cost us out of pocket $17,000. We paid a total of $4,000.
absolutely not true for every doctor. it sounds like you've had bad experiences with it but my practice is almost ALL medicare total or partial coverage. i never know what type of insurance the patient has (if any) and i do not let it affect my practice. not every doctor is like that.
My Bio (wedding pics added 7/6)
My 101
The bar insurance isn't a bad deal at all. I had it when I was solo!
We also have DH's life insurance through SBOTIT (which I read: State Bar of Texas Tit, because I am a 7 year old boy). Its pretty cheap and he qualified for $300K without a physical.
Sorry, I don't mean to generalize and imply that ALL doctors are like that, I know that's not true.
It's great to hear about doctors like you and your collegues who are real humans and compassionate ones at that. If the system were full of people like you, I don't think we would have gotten into the situation we are in now.
Also, admittedly, the doctors I've worked for/dealt with/heard about from friends in the health care industry have all been very arrogant. And ... I don't see any of those doctors now
In my ILs' surgical practice, they never know what kind of insurance a patient has unless the patient tells them. They have office staff who handle that end of things. Most of the doctors we see have nothing to do with billing and insurance - just patient care.
I agree with having catastrophic coverage, because after all, that is what insurance is for. It is much cheaper for us to have private insurance and pay small monthly premiums, and not unnecessarily over-pay on an annual basis, as you would through an employer-sponsored plan.
However, private insurance needs to be governed, in a BIG way. Private plans discourage getting the preventive care that would keep costs down if an illness/disease was caught early on. People on private plans are afraid to get flagged and kicked off their plan, so they don't go to the doctor. The insurance companies' reason for that is basically, "even a fever (ex.) can be a sign of cancer (ex.)." That way of thinking when you are in the business of providing health coverage for people, is ridiculous. Another reason for regulating private plans is that people can be denied coverage for the aforementioned pre-existing conditions reasons, as well as simple stuff like age, race (some diseases are more common in certain races as well as genders), gender. Of course no company would come out and deny you due to race/age/gender because that's obviously against the law. They would give you a bs reason for denial or no reason at all. Also, costs need to be regulated. If an insurance company offers my very healthy MIL, a plan costing $1200 per month for coverage, well, that is a problem. Some can afford that, but they shouldn't have to, especially on top of additional co-pays, deductibles, annual out-of-pockets and any extra hidden costs.
So, private companies should HAVE to accept people with pre-x conditions, should not discourage preventive care, and should be affordable. I do understand that from a business perspective, it would be bad business to assume a ton of risk (as in insuring POSSIBLY unhealthy people). But, if insurance is your business, that is a risk you are apparently willing to take. If private companies were regulated and each had to assume a certain amount of "risk" clients, it would all balance out and no company would be "winning" or getting to take just the young, healthy people. Does that make sense? I have a bunch of personal experience as well as family/friend/nestie experiences that go straight to my heart (and piss me off). I worked in HR, with a hefty part of my job being insurance related for over ten years...
I know that didn't answer the question of government run healthcare. Sorry, this subject is one of my hot buttons! I don't know enough about the proposed bill to say, but I'm inclined to think it's not necessary if some regulations were put into place. BTW, I love FCB's "put out the fire" analogy - how appropriate!
I'm late on this but I 100% agree. My Dad is in charge of a large Midwest practice for cardiology. They lose money on evert medicare patient they see and every surgery/procedure they preform for them ex:Medicare stent procedure is paid out roughly $100 when the stents alone are thousands plus a sterile room, anethesia, nurses and dr's time. Many dr's have stopped seeing medicare patients for these reasons and his group has tried to keep seeing them because they became doctors to help people, however they cannot put themselves out of business over it.
I am opposed to the new health bill for a variety of other issues as well.