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Re:What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills by darawk on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @04:58PM (#18720130)
> Acquiring insurance does nothing to ensure that the facility you visit will accept that insurance.

Does acquiring a credit card ensure that businesses will accept it? When you select your insurance plan, check who accepts it. Problem solved.

Re:What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills by ncallaway on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @05:24PM (#18720412)
Is there any chance that facilities that don't "accept" my credit card would be able to:

* Not inform me they don't accept my credit card

* Provide the goods and/or render the services

* Charge my 10 times the standard price for those goods and/or services because my card was not accepted?

No sane person would agree that this would be an acceptable regime for credit cards. Yet it's the world we live in with health insurance.

A "free market" is only effective with price transparency and discovery mechanisms. This is not possible in the current healthcare and insurance system as it exists today.

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Aside from that, you failed to even engage or address the following points from my earlier comment.

> Further, even if the facility you visit does accept the insurance, that's no guarantee that all doctors within that facility accept that insurance.

> Even further, there's no guarantee you'll be conscious to validate that you go to a facility that accepts your insurance.

I think both of those points address and rebut your "check who accepts it" argument. Do you have any response to those?

Re:What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills by MattGrommes on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @05:12PM (#18720269)
If you read the article you'll find that the problem is that while the hospital may accept your insurance, a particular doctor won't. Also for some reason some doctors don't even know what insurance programs they'll bill.
Re:What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills by darawk on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @06:24PM (#18720957)
Seems easy to solve by forcing doctors to accept the insurance plans that their hospital does.
Re:What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills by swish_bob on Thursday December 20, 2018 @05:11AM (#18723717)
Seems easier to solve by just having a single entity paying the doctors'/hospitals' costs.
Re:What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills by tclancy on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @05:03PM (#18720178)
And only have emergencies around there and don't lose consciousness! It's simple math people!
Re:What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills by darawk on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @05:05PM (#18720209)
Buy insurance that has good coverage for the places you are likely to be. Why is that a problem?
Re:What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills by nogrammer on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @06:17PM (#18720890)
...because even if you end up at a hospital where your coverage is great, they often have doctors or providers that won't accept your insurance, and there's just about no way to know this beforehand.
Re:What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills by darawk on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @06:24PM (#18720954)
So force hospitals and doctors to align on insurance acceptance, seems pretty simple.
Re:What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills by ceejayoz on Thursday December 20, 2018 @12:05PM (#18726673)
And buy travel insurance any time you want to drive more than a hundred miles or so?
Re:What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills by hiokuer on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @06:02PM (#18720772)
Move to Europe or mostly any place outside the US and be able to forget about this idiocy.