Is This A Plan?
I’m quite confident that today is March, 5 so I wonder about Medicare telling me:
Your Medicare Part B (Medical Insurance) covers a test to see if you have Coronavirus. This test is covered when your doctor or a health care provider orders it, if you get the test on or after February 4, 2020. You usually pay nothing for Medicare-covered clinical diagnostic laboratory tests.
And the add on:
Note: Your provider will need to wait until after April 1, 2020 to submit a claim to Medicare for this test.
The thing is, the CDC didn’t announce that they would begin testing on a limited basis until February, 14: “The agency said it is working with public health laboratories in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and New York City to begin testing for cases of the virus.”
As I am over a thousand miles away from any of those cities, it is highly unlikely that I could have been tested before this week, and it isn’t certain that the test would be available in this area for days or weeks. This is chaos leadership by morons that cannot end well.
5 comments
Chaos has been standard operating procedure from Medicare for decades. A single payer, national health insurance, operating as social insurance, makes tons of sense, and would be a source of order rather than chaos. But anything other than chaos makes it impossible for private, indemnity, insurance to thrive, so Medicare has been structured to mimic indemnity insurance, then progressively restructured to be more like indemnity insurance whenever its social insurance basic structure threatens to bring too much order to our current non-system.
Don’t expect the non-system’s behavior in a population health crisis to be any different from its ongoing behavior in the millions of individual health crises that occur every year in this country.
Well, maybe Karma will help improve the situation regarding COVID-19 testing. You know me Bryan & know I rarely wish ill on anyone, unless I am certain they 100% deserve it! And Trump (and Pence), 100% deserves it! So, I am hoping this is true. It’s the best hope the USA has right now. (I left a comment on this tweet).
https://twitter.com/Harley62/status/1236475586551238658
Medicare is a a medical insurance program that served my Mother and me well until Trump. Then the people he put in charge have spent too much time and money making annoying little tweaks. Even with that, it is a hell of a lot easier to deal with Medicare than any of the private insurance companies. I have messed around with medical billing software whose basic purpose is to provide the proper codes that service providers need to put on the individual company’s claim form to get paid. You need a subscription to get updated codes every month. If you have a single payer system you are cutting the overhead costs for billing of every health care provider.
The biggest problem in implementing “Medicare for all” is the lie that it is socialized medicine. Britain has socialized medicine, but Canada has a single payer system. I support “Medicare for all” because I know too many people with bad health insurance or no health insurance. Everyone in the US should be able to get medical care without worrying about bankruptcy or homelessness.
Yeah, Kryten, I’ve seen that being reported in a number of places. It would be wonderful if karma got off its butt and got busy on that germophobic lard bucket.
It doesn’t really matter anyhow. The CDC sent a whole 500 (five hundred) test kits to San Francisco, for a metropolitan area of 4.5 million people. Nobody is being tested unless they’re on the verge of death or have been in direct contact with someone on the verge of death and have a fever. As for why the CDC developed their own test kit rather than use the one that the World Health Organization developed in coordination with the Chinese health authorities, or why the FDA did not approve PCR testing for the new coronavirus until yesterday (every swinging d*ck has PCR testing capability nowadays, heck, my VETERINARIAN has access to PCR testing for viruses now, that’s how I know that my recently deceased cat Tux had the coronavirus that causes FIP), well, Trump administration corruption and incompetence is my only explanation.
It is becoming more and more clear that the Trumpist are restricting testing to avoid having to admit that the virus is all over creation and other countries are assuming that passengers from the US are probably infected.
The March Madness will be without fans in the courts and the NBA is cancelling games after a player tested positive for the virus. European football games have no spectators in the stadiums. The WHO admits it is a “pandemic”. Too bad the US government refuses to accept it as a problem.
It is criminal to give 500 tests to SF. Some one needs to explain to Trump that he is killing his voters.
I wish my vet would agree to treat me. He has better diagnostic equipment than my primary care physician.
Talking about how often Trump washes his hands ignores his habit of running his hand down his tie. His tie is certainly a repository of infection. We know that some people with the virus don’t display any symptoms but are still contagious. The only way of finding them is through testing. People will die because of Trump’s incompetence.