Niot varying amount, fixed amount between $3-400 is deducted from SS. Not sure how much I pay. I shouldn’t be paying for part B since that is covered by retirees’ benefit or part A that is covered by medicare tax over the years, Rx and ental etc is also covered by my employer. The only thing is the supplemental. I thought I signed that up with the medicare and the cost was being deducted from monthly SS. I am guessing a mistake is made at some point and I am paying for part B.
@“Cardinal Fang” can you explain better than I am!
Medicare part B isn’t free. You pay a cost for,that which is deducted from your monthly SS benefit. If you are a “high wage earner” the cost is HIGHER than for folks who aren’t. My Medicare Part A and B would,have been $140 a mont or so. I am considered a high wage earner (because husband is still working full time). The higher amount is deducted from my SS benefit every month. In addition, I get a bill for an additional Part D fee for being a high wage earner.
@Iglooo if your income is pretty high, this could be your issue. It is not a variable amount. It’s the same HIGHER amount every month.
You should,have received a letter from SS or Medicare regarding this high wage earner additional charge. I did.
But if you are not sure…give Medicare a call. See what your premium is…and why it’s what it is.
Thank you, @thumper1 I’ll check with my employer when I get home. I got a letter from SS explaining the deductions based on last year’s tax return. My mind goes blank whenever health insurance comes up. I usually agree to whatever presented to me.
“ACA is a very good deal for most people who are subsidized.” of course when you get taxpayers to pay for you it is a great deal.(OPM—other peoples money)
but the coverage in my state is terrible, and when you call a doctor’s office the first question is do you have obamacare?..no…good we do not take obamacare plans.
so if you need a specialist good luck…you can always go to the ER but when it is finished with a deductible of 6250.00 you will be in a bad spot.
for a lot of people the best idea is to try and get on medicaid and get your coverage 100% taxpayer covered.
We taxpayers pay for lots of tings for others. Think about the range of things your taxes go for.
Unfortunately, there are only two ways to control costs: ration on price or on volume (services). Pre-ACA was the former; now we have the latter.
“A good deal for most people who are subsidized…” There is no free lunch. The “good deal” gravy train won’t last forever.
As for transparency in pricing: health systems can charge just one price. If they charge different prices to different people, they are - according to the government - engaging in discrimination. So the cost of a procedure is $10 and the provider wants to charge $15. Medicare pays $11. If you want to pay cash out of pocket and would like to negotiate a price of $12, the provider would say no, even though he would make 100% more profit than by billing Medicare. the reason is that he would be “discriminating” by “charging” you less even though he would be receiving more. It is all crazy. Notice that Medicare criminalizes the act of you negotiating your own prices and criminalizes physicians who charge Medicare patients anything other than the Medicare rate.
As for codes: we used to have about 17,000 billing codes. Due to government mandate to keep us “up to date” we now have about ~140,000 codes. Of course, the state purpose of this complexity is that it is that it is for our own good and the government can make our lives better. But the obvious consequence is that billing and coding are vastly complex requiring the employment of zillions of clerks, statisticians, auditors, regulators, etc. The complexity makes price transparency impossible (on purpose) and manufactures “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Few things are subsidized more than healthcare. Subsidies increase prices. Subsidies increase regulations. Increased prices and regulations compel those who favor them to “improve” the system by increasing prices and regulations. Then people believe that the system is “too complicated” for markets to work. They invoke the hallowed highway argument that the world could not function with privatization of the economy. The only good thing about socialism is that it always fails of its own weight.
"Few things are subsidized more than healthcare. "
Education is one.
Roads, bridges, emergency services, water supply issues in drought areas, superfunds.
I’m not judging this. It is our system and we’re one big country.
Well, K through 12.^^^
What is really worrisome in medicine is the corporatization of what used to be private practices. Big medical conglomerates are gobbling up private practices. The small private practices are being squeezed by the insurance and government payments and are being ‘forced’ into these large provider organizations. Doctors I know resent being overlorded by administrators who have no clue about how to practice medicine.
Much more than K-12. Colleges and universities are tax-exempt organizations. Our donations to fund their endowments are tax-exempt. If they didn’t enjoy that status, there would be much less merit and need based aid floating around.
Corporatization of medicine definitely predates ACA.
And we could substitute farming for medicine, another small enterprise now swallowed up.
^And heavily subsidized as well!
^my in laws don’t see it/think so
National defense.
Social Security.
^family farms, again, not so much.
Transparency in healthcare pricing means nothing unless the actual cost is included. You can request an itemized bill for a hospital stay and see that they are charging $10 for a tylenol pill. Yes that is transparent.
But why do charge $10 for a tylenol when I could by hundreds for the same price. And it is not because you need to pay for the delivery of that tylenol to you in your bed. They charge hundreds of dollars for every 8 hours nurses shift and hundreds of dollars for ever 24 hours in the room, among other transparently detailed charges.
Transparency will only be real when they show the actual costs also.
I think these exorbitant markups are the underlying cause of this whole mess. What can we do about that?
Yes, when D was hospitalized and they charged her $5/aspirin, I insisted they must have meant $5 for all the many, many aspirin she got in the hospital. Insurer didn’t say anything about the bill and was fine with paying.
It would be nice if charges bore SOME relationship to costs.
The hospital charged us $500 for “operating room prep” when my son was never operated on. When I questioned the charge, the woman asked, “Were they THINKING about operating?” Uh, no… At least they took off the charge. At that point, when insurance was still decent, Anthem would have paid that, anyway, but I didn’t want them getting ripped off, either.