Michael Moore's Latest Target: Your HMO

[Schneed10]

Originally Posted by Beemnseven

What's "sad" about our health care system?

The fact that if you come to my hospital for an emergency appendectomy and you have a PPO or HMO with Aetna, we'll get paid about $3500 by your insurance company.

If you come in with Cigna, your insurer pays us $6000.

If you don't have insurance and you come in for the same emergency appendectomy, we'll charge you $150,000. You probably won't pay it, but we'll probably force you to give us at least $20,000 and call it a day.

All for the same procedure. So the worse your coverage is, the more your insurance company pays us. Then the crappy insurance companies have to pass the cost on to the people. In the end, only white collar employees with PPOs end up with affordable healthcare premiums.

I'm not kidding. It's common for hospitals to do; it seems unscrupulous but you can't even blame them because of the way the system is set up. If the hospitals don't get paid that well by just a few insurance companies, the cost of treating Medicaid patients would put us out of business.