I also heard during the week from a talk-show caller that hospitals collect 130% or so from the insured, about 94% from Medicare, and 86% from Medicaid (last two may be flipped).

I think it’s fair to say that a lot of what hospitals collect for services to the uninsured comes directly from state and local governments already, and is NOT included directly or indirectly in the premiums of the insured.

CAP’s alleged average national per-family premium addition due to uninsured care is $1,100; Ohio’s average is $1,000. CAP naively assumes that every dollar of care provided for free is automatically added to premiums.

From Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health:
http://www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/press_releases/2007/anderson_hospital_charges.html

Hospitals collect about 39% of what they bill cash (uninsured) customers but they bill them over three times as much as Medicare customers pay. That’s right. Hospitals actually collect almost 120% from the uninsured as an entire group compared to what they collect for the same services provided to Medicare patients. Hospitals actually only collect a couple of percent less from the uninsured as a group than they do from the insured as a group for the same services. It is Medicare/Medicaid that freeload off of both the insured and uninsured groups’ payments. The insurance industry is doing their best to claim a cost where none exists and the hospitals are trying to keep their actual non-losses on uninsured out of the public eye.

The uninsured cash customers are just a innocent scape goat for what the industry wants to do for its own reasons.

I wonder what the receptionit’s response would have been if you had asked to see his schedule for the day you were there? I wonder what it looked like? Oh, not in today… or ever? Let us know if you ever get a meeting. After all, you made the effort to show up and to pay for parking. It’s not like a ton of people showed up. The least the Congresscritter could do would be to give you a quick call.

My dream is to get a post beating interview with Megyn Kelly on Fox News. Now that’s astroturfing you can believe in.

A half-wit Glen Beck enthusiast with an exquisite feel for irony but lacking the self-awareness to detect it in himself intercepts covert idiotic radio and television messages and uncovers archived secrets and scandals of deceitful proportions, this, as the moderator intones “Some times you just have to believe in something, even if it isn’t true!”. Aghast, he goes next door to his WASP neighbor, cautiously excited, as the aforementioned was a over-medicated GOP precinct worker whom the teabagger enthusiast wanted friendship of. The lanky, thick-skulled, pie-eyed neighbor is slumped over the imported compressed sawdust dining room table, poisoned just thirty seconds before by his wife, just home from target practice, who most likely already knew of the patriotic enthusiast’s forthcoming revelations. A prickly line of sweat covers the enthusiast’s forehead now, as the realization hits him that the same pundits and other agitators him and his now brain-dead compatriots once cowered before and backed and talked of in hushed tones, have tricked him into their war against himself and the very same comrades, whom, through the years, the enthusiast and brain-dead supporters would have wished torture upon each other. A dick-less peon of the patriot walks in and casually assaults the Glen Beck fan in his kitchen for murder and sedition against the government. The mad bitch swings crazily to the enthusiast’s left side, towards his new dental work, while briefly remembering that his mother was a helicopter dust-off operator and had a large black dog. Just as a wild roundhouse whizzes by is left temple, the alcoholic lemming-like imbecile drops to his knees, almost punching his own unit and flings a can that was crammed in his pocket onto the lawn, littered with previously deposited cans of spud-free Lackey, an alcohol-free lager. A grime-smeared full sized Chevy pick-up truck is parked outside, with pro-nicotine pro-nuclear crap on the side panels. I digress however; The mad kid, two days before, had just got back from a backwoods cookie party, catered by the same quasi-religious zealots and Pharma-corporation manipulators. He had his black horse-hair coat, and a black party archbishop’s hat with three bars for a skull-and-crossbones. And this day he looked like the victim of a pogrom.

Don’t you worry, when the price is right they will show up. ACORN has hundreds of millions earmarked to stimulate them. The money of those who are against Obamacare is earmarked to those who “support” Obamacare. In Los Angelos, the going price is $10-15/hr. joining the astroturd, er, I mean astroturf.

From an acorn grows an oak tree; from ACORN grows AstroTurd.

We outnumbered them by a few and were better mannered too. We managed to put this together, signs and all, with less than 24 hours notice. We get the notifications from the MoveOn or other pro Obama groups, make our signs and turn out. Be sure and arrive early if you go to one of these demos and take pictures of the busses being unloaded – it is often done in a far corner of the parking lot.

Smile and counter chants with facts – it drives them crazy, since all they have is slogans and many don’t even understand them. Every once in a while you encounter a couple of moderates caught up by friends – you can make some headway there with reasonable arguments and facts.