Remington: ‘Sorry for your loss — here’s your bill’
With the family of deceased Canadian skier Sarah Burke facing a U.S. medical bill topping the value of an average Calgary home, I was reminded Friday of a quote by the late Justice Emmett Hall, a crusader for Canada’s public health-care system.
“We as a society are aware that the trauma of illness, the pain of surgery, the slow decline to death are burdens enough for the human being to bear without the added burden of medical or hospital bills penalizing the patient at the moment of vulnerability,” Hall wrote in a 1979 review of publicly funded health insurance.
To help Burke’s husband Rory Bushfield pay an expected $550,000 medical bill for nine days of intensive care in Utah, a website was set up by Burke’s agent asking for donations. The site had reached nearly $200,000 as of this writing Friday afternoon, prompting the Canadian Freestyle Ski Association to announce that the amount was enough that her family “will not have any financial burden related to her care.”
Park City Vantage Point Puts Tragedy of American Health Care in Vivid Relief
Grieving family of fallen Canadian skier Sarah Burke faces massive hospital bill it wouldn’t face at home.PARK CITY, Utah — The journey I embarked on when I made the decision to leave a successful career in the health insurance business was a spiritual one. I can trace the decision to a true epiphany, to the very moment I saw hundreds of people standing, soaking wet, in long, slow-moving lines, waiting to get medical care that was being provided in animal stalls at a fairground in Wise County, Virginia.
It hit me immediately that had my circumstances been a little different when I was growing up near there, I could have been one of those people. It also hit me that the work I was doing as a spokesman for the insurance industry was making it necessary, at least in part, for those people to resort to such humiliation to get basic medical care. One of my responsibilities was to persuade Americans of the lie that most of the uninsured are that way by choice, that they have shirked their responsibility to themselves and their families. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Our so-called health care “system” had simply left them behind.
http://wendellpotter.com/2012/01/park-city-vantage-point-puts-tragedy-of-american-health-care-in-vivid-relief/
Santorum says Obama pushes doctors from Medicare
LADY LAKE, Fla. (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Monday warned Florida's seniors that the Democrats' health law would limit their access to doctors and dollars and criticized his main rivals for backing its requirement that younger Americans buy health insurance.Santorum tried to draw a connection between Medicareand a key provision of the health care law, the so-calledindividual mandate, which doesn't affect older Americans because virtually all of them are already covered through the government program.
http://news.yahoo.com/santorum-says-obama-pushes-doctors-medicare-193527342.html
Attorney general warns of supplemental insurance scams
Posted Jan. 20, 2012, at 7:14 p.m.
AUGUSTA, Maine — Attorney General William J. Schneider is warning consumers about recent reports of calls from people claiming to represent supplemental health insurance offers.
Schneider said he has learned that Maine seniors have received phone calls from individuals claiming to be from Medicare or from the “health office.”
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