Bernie is on JRE

The joys of insurance. When you have to pay out of pocket, price matters.

 

Do you have some sort of special insurance where the premiums don’t come out of your pocket?

 

Partially paid by employer, the remainder by deduction prior to direct deposit of compensation. I am aware that I am paying, but I do not write a check. You know exactly what I meant. Stop being obtuse.

 

I was only half joking..... When discussing healthcare in the US it's the example I always use. We happen to have one of the top Vet Schools in the nation here in BR, and they turn out some great specialists. Still, the access to their skillset costs a fraction of what human healthcare costs. When you remove bureaucracy from the equation it shows what is possible. Meanwhile some of the Caribbean made docs around here should be removed from practice.

 

Yeah, I know. But that's something I recognized as a problem really early on, like 17, and it's always bothered me. It's almost like money laundering. They toss it and turn it so it seems like they're only taking a little at a time, it comes out of your check before you see it, and your employer pays part of it, but it's still too much. If costs were lower, rates would be lower, your employer could use that money to give you a raise, etc, etc.

It DOES give me a thought though, but that deserves it's own thread. Stand by.......

 

I do too. In the past four years I've had two dogs that needed MAJOR medical care. One cost about $20k over 8 months, the other cost $7k all at once. We also have an extremely good vet school that provides essentially human grade medical care. Had either of these animals been children, these bills would have been well into six figures, possibly seven.

 

That ain't right...

 

How much more training and costs go into teaching a heart specialist as opposed to a vet? What about the facilities? Equipment? Staff? I've never seen a human have surgery in a strip mall office before outside of dental work.

I don't disagree on the pricing aspect of this. Emergency care is a different animal (pun intended) where costs to save a life be damned. I don't know anyone who would say "It's going to cost how much? Let them die".

At the vet, I am expected to pay at the time of service. Most people if forced to do that with say cancer treatment for a child, will not be able to afford it. Depending on the costs, I would be one of those.

 

Isosceles what you did there........

 

What?

 

You can go to the vet, I'll stick with my MD.

 

Want to do a little experiment? Go to your doctor with a sinus infection and get a prescription for antibiotics. Have them send the prescription to Walgreens. Take your dog to the vet with a sinus infection (or better yet, if she's been there before, just call the vet and tell them she has another sinus infection) and have them send the prescription to Walgreens.

Check your statement from your insurance company at the end of the month. The MD would have charged you, through your insurance company, hundreds of dollars, if not more, for the visit and probably about a hundred dollars for the antibiotic. You'd have spend $40 or so for the vet checkup (if you even had to go) and probably $20 cash for the pills.

Earlier in this thread some guy tried to rail on me for wanting to "take" other people's money. How is not giving a shit what medical care costs because it's being spread out through everyone via insurance companies any different? We all owe it to everyone else to do something about this and get these costs down because they ultimately get spread out and passed on to each and every one of us, no different than if it were done via taxation and socialized medicine.

 

I am fully aware of the differential in costs between veterinary care and human care. A direct comparison is ridiculously simplistic, and, quite frankly, vet care costs are increasing at a rate faster than inflation. If I had to hazard a guess, it is partially due to pet health insurance.

 

A cute pun...

 

Vet insurance and the "pets instead of children" phenomenon.

 

I got nothing. I'm trying to thing of some way to work Pythagoras into this but it's not coming to me

 

Pythagoras walks into a bar and starts explaining his new theory to the bartender...

"A triangle has three faces. a short face, x, a long face, y, and a thing called a hypotenuse, z. Now, what I have discovered is that if you add the square of x to the square of z, it's equal to the square of..."

The bartender raises his hand to stop Pythagoras, and says, "Y, the long face?"

 

Is Pythagoras a horse?