Uninsured Blogger Gets Hospitalized, Friend Says Donations Will Help Pay For Daughters’ Dance Lessons
If you don’t follow the blogosphere closely, you may not be familiar with the case of Caleb Howe. Caleb is a conservative blogger who writes for RedState.com, and who wound up in a North Carolina hospital in July, in critical condition due to a failing liver. Thankfully Caleb is on his way to recovery now, and is “working hard on healing.” We certainly wish him a complete and speedy recovery.
Sites as diverse as ThinkProgress and Breitbart.com have put out the call for donations to a fund that has been set up to help Howe with his expenses. All well and good. This is America, after all, and Americans step up for each other in hard times. RedState’s boss Erick Erickson made it clear in his appeal that the donations would be for the benefit of Caleb’s family, but he left out one detail: Howe has no medical insurance.
Howe’s friend and fellow blogger Melissa Clouthier explains how the donations will help:
On a personal note, Caleb’s girls are dancers and quite good and that’s expensive. Having a dad who can’t work means losing opportunities. These donations will help them pursue their dreams while their dad gets well.
Also, here’s what the hospital will do for Caleb or anyone in a similar situation: they’ll assess his ability to pay and then bill him a small amount each month until they forgive the debt or it’s paid off. I’ve known people who pay $5 a month.
Clouthier is telling everyone that donors have been contributing so that Howe’s daughters can continue dance lessons while he is unable to work, and the hospital will just have to make due with whatever amount he can afford to give them, even as little as $5 a month. In Howe’s defense, he did not say that this was his intended use for the money; that came from Clouthier. Here’s why Clouthier’s scenario is unacceptable, and how Obamacare will put an end to issues like this.
Clouthier has her facts right. If you are admitted to a public hospital, the hospital is required to work out a payment plan with you if you cannot afford to pay your bill. This applies even if you have insurance; a policy with high deductibles, for example. This arrangement sounds good when it is related in the way it is presented by Clouthier, but it ignores an underlying problem.
Suppose you receive a $100,000 hospital bill, which is totally possible for patients with certain conditions. Because of your financial situation you can only pay that bill at the rate of $100 per month. At $1200 per year it would take you 83.3 years to pay that bill. In other words, your hospital bill will likely not be paid off in your lifetime.
Obviously a hospital needs operating revenue, of which they will not get much from anyone who is paying a large bill in small payments. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average hospital expense per patient day in the United States was $1960 as of 2011. Patients who have insurance, and that small minority who can afford to pay out of pocket pay their share of the hospital’s expenses, and a portion of expenses incurred by the hospital from those who are on payment plans. This is one of the largest reasons why medical care costs have skyrocketed: hospitals are required to give the uninsured care they cannot pay for, and those hospitals are then forced to raise the cost of rooms and procedures to cover the expense of those uninsured patients. When your insurance company pays $2000 for an MRI, part of that payment is for your MRI, and the rest pays part of the bill for uninsured patients who couldn’t pay for their own MRI’s. Keep in mind that many who believe this is ok, as Clouthier apparently believes, also want to reduce funds for Medicaid, creating more uninsured and making the situation even worse.
Thankfully Obamacare will change this, as more people will be insured and fewer will have to work out a payment arrangement after an extended hospital stay. “Junk” insurance policies, that offer very little in the way of useful benefits, will no longer be sold. People such as Caleb Howe will be able to buy a “catastrophic” plan, which will cost less than more inclusive plans, and will cover large hospital bills. Most importantly, under Obamacare people like Caleb Howe won’t have to choose between paying the dance instructor and paying the hospital. And when they pay the dance instructor, they won’t be leaving the hospital bill for the rest of us. Read more: http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/08/25/uninsured-blogger-gets-hospitalized-friend-says-donations-will-help-pay-for-daughters-dance-lessons/#ixzz2d2xvQFLB
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