MGTOW Life: Upfront Pricing for Medicine!

Part of MGTOW life, especially for those inclined to go monk or ghost, is not having medical insurance. Obamacare was a nightmare in that regard and even on a good day, health insurance is a misnomer. A health service plan, more like.

The medical industry has been notorious for refusing upfront pricing. That’s one reason for HMOs, they negotiate for decent prices with the folks who tell you to close your eyes and open your mouth. But many MGTOWs prefer to simply pay cash.

There are many benefits to cash. Men have fewer health problems than women and being able to cash is a reward for clean living. There are no middlemen. Many providers will give discounts for cash customers.

But the main barrier to using cash is that doctors never want to talk about the costs. This is now changing with the Trump administration:

Hospitals required to post all prices online beginning January 1

https://wlos.com/news/nation-world/medicare-will-require-hospitals-to-post-all-prices-online

26 December 2018

WASHINGTON (AP) . Medicare will require hospitals to post their standard prices online and make electronic medical records more readily available to patients, officials said Tuesday.

The program is also starting a comprehensive review of how it will pay for costly new forms of immunotherapy to battle cancer.

Blah blah cancer, whatever. Price transparency has finally arrived! What a pity it had to be forced upon the industry by the Feds.

Seema Verma, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the new requirement for online prices reflects the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to encourage patients to become better-educated decision makers in their own care.

.We are just beginning on price transparency,. said Verma. .We know that hospitals have this information and we’re asking them to post what they have online..

Hospitals are required to disclose prices publicly…

So they say, but so I’ve never yet seen.

…but the latest change would put that information online in machine-readable format that can be easily processed by computers. It may still prove to be confusing to consumers, since standard rates are like list prices and don’t reflect what insurers and government programs pay.

Patients concerned about their potential out-of-pocket costs from a hospitalization would still be advised to consult with their insurer. Most insurance plans nowadays have an annual limit on how much patients must pay in copays and deductibles . although traditional Medicare does not.

This could revolutionize medical payments. Instead of joining an HMO or health insurance company, one could theoretically prepurchase likely tests… at a package discount? Even with business as usual, comparative pricing will do much to invoke Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand.

Likewise, many health care providers already make computerized records available to patients, but starting in 2021 Medicare would base part of a hospital’s payments on how good a job they do.

Using electronic medical records remains a cumbersome task, and the Trump administration has invited technology companies to design secure apps that would let patients access their records from all their providers instead of having to go to different portals.

I’m less thrilled about electronic records in an age of Goolag surveillance and social media monetizing my daily life. In fact, when California implemented Obamacare several tech giants offered to build a centralized State medical record hub for free, out of the goodness of their hearts. My paranoia is still twitchy at that.

Verma also announced Medicare is starting a comprehensive review of how it will pay for a costly new form of immunotherapy called CAR-T. It’s gene therapy that turbocharges a patient’s own immune system cells to attack cancer.

Immune system T cells are filtered from the patient’s own blood and reprogrammed to target and kill cancer cells that had managed to evade them. Hundreds of millions of copies of the revved-up cells are then returned to the patient’s blood to take on the cancer.

Though only a couple of such treatments have been approved for blood cancers, the cost can exceed $370,000 per patient.

.It.s a new area for the agency,. said Verma. .We haven’t seen drugs priced at this level and we’re having to think about our strategy..

This is a different issue from price transparency but one for MGTOW minimalists to consider. Without considerable savings or misfortune, the end of one’s modern life is more likely to be a function of money than a function of health care. It would suck to die knowing there’s an unaffordable cure that could have given you a few more years of life. Of course, it would suck even more to pay into the System for decades and then end up in the same place. Money can’t buy happiness but money can rent it.

If you don’t live minimalist then your tax money will purchase some Baby Boomer a $400k cancer treatment. Trump hasn’t yet improved health care enough to thwart that. In fact, a major reason doctors don’t like to post prices online is because if they’re denied full reimbursement from Medicare & third parties then they need to make up the loss elsewhere in order to stay in business. Which means men with few health problems. Which is why men go MGTOW.

What must ultimately happen is patients guaranteeing payment to their providers then filing their own paperwork for reimbursement. Sadly, the unwillingness of wimminz voters to pay their own bills like that is exactly how Medicare got enacted in the first place.

Meanwhile, I must give Trump credit. He’s getting a lot of bureaucracy cut away while waging war over building the Wall and draining the Swamp.

When the news media isn’t slandering the President, they’re hushing his accomplishments.