I have set on a few health care symposiums where everyone said that costs could be reduced 60 to 70% if people paid their bills.
If the delinquency rate is that high then I don't see how we'll ever have lower health care costs in our current system. Just following chickens and eggs here but:
- Medical Bill too expensive so it goes to collections
- Hospital can't collect so has to eat the cost, bakes it into the cost for next year to "recoup"
- Medical Bill is even more expensive next year, so even those who could afford to pay send it to collections instead
- Etc.
Heck, Credit Scores are now being adjusted to ignore medical collections because they have observed a difference in medical bills going uncollected and other bills going uncollected. If someone gets a $30k bill for a heart transplant, only the very wealthiest among us would pay that bill. If the bill was what it actually cost (using your 70% figure) at $9000, significantly more people would be able to pay that. On a payment plan for 24 months that's $375/mo.
Your proposal that people pay for health care up front is already happening. In several of my wife's tests/treatments we had to pay upfront what the expected deductible would be before she got treatment.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shot...efore-treatment It also seems emergency treatments are requiring upfront payments:
After arriving by ambulance at the emergency department, Susan Bradshaw lay on a gurney in her hospital gown with a surgical bonnet on her head, waiting to be wheeled into surgery to remove her appendix at a hospital near her home in Maitland, Fla. A woman in street clothes approached her. Identifying herself as the surgeon's office manager, she demanded that Bradshaw make her $1,400 insurance payment before the surgery could proceed.
