Arizona streicht fast einer halben Million Einwohnern die medizinischen Schulden

This is good, but the concept of buying discount medical debt from a doctor is so degrading to human dignity.

There goes the „radical left scum,“ actually caring about people other than the rich.

Waiting for Republicans to scream “Communism!!” and “Socialism!!” about this. Those people are deranged.

Politician does something good for ordinary Americans. That’s a piece of news you won’t hear coming from Washington.

To me, this shows how broken our current system is.

Back in the day before Obamacare, I founded a startup, and didn’t qualify for insurance.
OK, I’ll pay cash.

We talked to our local hospital and asked what the cost was a procedure. They said „we can’t tell you“.

„You can’t tell me? I’m paying cash, I want to know what the out the door cost is“

„We can’t tell you. We can only tell you afterwards…“

So I spent the last ~2 years with 100k in medical debt hanging like a guillotine over my family’s head. Picked it up because Anthem used every dirty trick under the sun to dodge paying for my husband’s lifesaving surgery. After hundreds of hours of effort and coordinating with my State Senator + Attorney General, we got it cancelled as of yesterday.

If you haven’t experienced this, you don’t know how it ruins your life. It feels like the health insurance cartels are swinging an axe at your loved one’s neck and you need to keep piles of money onhand to block the strike, buying you time to appeal. Because even if you’re contesting the payments, your payment plan could fire up any day with no notice. Not to mention that you got in this spot due to health problems that didn’t magically disappear, so you need to be ready to fund the next surgery too if necessary (we probably need 3 total) when you haven’t even settled payment for this one.

I haven’t vacationed in years. I haven’t been able to invest any of my money (need as much onhand as possible in case), so I got hit hard by inflation. I had to massively reduce funds going to my retirement. I had to move to a high-pay city with better medical care, and I haven’t bought a plane ticket to see my family in years–within my own country it feels like I’m a foreign worker sending remittances to a distant land, isolated from all my connections. I have had to make peace that rest of my life would likely be spent as a medical debt slave. A lifetime of having to take jobs I hate to make enough to stay ahead of just the interest on my debt, all the rewards for my work getting siphoned off to the debtowners. For years, I often haven’t been able to sleep because I can’t stop shaking in rage. And I’ve spent almost every day in fight or flight mode over it, constantly brawling insurance.

Now that we’ve „won“–victory here means just getting Anthem to do what we’re paying them for btw–it’s actually confusing. I keep mentally reaching for this thing and it’s not there. Like if you’ve gotten so used to glasses for decades and switch to contacts, and keep reaching to adjust your glasses reflexively. That’s the extent to which this constant fight for my family’s life has normalized itself in my everyday life and mental patterns.

Every single governor needs to do this. And we need to make this the new litmus test.

Must be nice having a state that cares

DEMOCRAT Governor Katie Hobbs.

Hope to see more publicity when Dems do things like this to save average Americans from medical bankruptcy. And calling out republicans for opposing this. Repubs are good at splashing performative self-congratulations all over social media, when they achieve less than this.

Actually , when one in five adults carries past-due medical balances, wiping the slate is economic stimulus with a human face and it didn’t even need a federal fight.

That’s what happens when you let the insurance companies write Healthcare legislation.

Put Katie’s name all over the letter they send to make sure everyone knows who did this for them. 

Red State socialism

The fact that this even an issue is sooo fucked up OMG