Five days after receiving his COVID-19 diagnosis, Darius Settles was dead. Just last month, he turned 30.
Having just turned 30, Settles is the youngest person to die from COVID-19 in Nashville, dying just five days after being diagnosed.
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Horseshit.
I'm retired, considered low income in Tennessee, and have a health insurance plan through Blue Cross/Blue shield that costs me zero dollars a month in premium fees. Yeah, it's not the best plan in the world - I have to pay the first $1500 in both doctor/hospital bills and prescriptions, then I'm responsible for half the doctor visits and prescriptions after that, but there's a $7000 cap per year on what comes out of my pocket. It's not the best plan in the world but it's better than nothing.
Not only that, but I got a letter from them a few months ago saying they will cover ALL covid-related doctor visits, hospitalizations, and prescriptions for FREE.
He didn't die because he couldn't afford health insurance, he died because he had that immortality complex like all youngsters and didn't bother looking for something he could afford.
He died "with" the Wuhan, not "because" of the Wuhan
ReplyDeleteIndeed. Omission is the most reprehensible of lies.
DeleteJournalism today is all emotional. Was he fat have underlying health conditions. People have die from this with great health insurance. With his young age I would bet money he had health problems
ReplyDeleteIt's a twofer for the Dems and mainstream media... Covid bad, socialized medicine good.
ReplyDeleteOops. Threefer. He was from the underserved Black 'community'.
He most likely had other issues which killed him, so he died WITH the chicom flu, not FROM it, but the media won't tell you that.
ReplyDeleteWirecutter,
ReplyDeleteYou do have a good insurance plan. The theory of insurance is to insure you against a disaster, and not to pay for every little thing that goes wrong. In the long run, that minimizes your costs by exposing you to acceptable risk.
If something happened, and you had to pay $7,000, it would be tough to pay that off, but it would not be the end of the world. If, God forbid, you needed surgery and a hospital stay that costs $150 K, you have a $7,000 safety net, and you would not have to forfeit assets or declare bankruptcy for that bill.
ObamaCare really screwed me. I was paying $350 per month prior to ObabaCare for a policy similar to yours. Now with ObamaCare, I am paying $620 per month for an extra crappy policy, with over a $12,000 deductible.
Unfortunately, the actuaries that determine health insurance rates do nothing to reduce medical costs. By reducing waste, and making healthcare more efficient, the cost would be far less.
My jobs spoiled me. All my adult life I had jobs that had great insurance plans with doctor's visits and prescriptions having a 5 dollar co-pay and most hospital stays and medical procedures being free with the exception of ER visits which were 500 bucks. In a 30 year period I don't think I paid more than a couple thousand bucks.
DeleteLike you, my job also spoiled me. Thirty Four years with the same company and part of the reason was the excellent benefits.
DeleteObamacare really screwed us. When Obamacare became law, my premiums more than doubled while my deductibles tripled. But gee, we got free neonatal care and well baby visits. (My wife and I are in our sixties.) And, we also got drug rehab. What more could anyone want?
We both have since retired, but now the problem is that all of my previous doctors are either retiring or are leaving private practice due to all of the overriding bullshit everyone has to go through nowadays.
Yep, insurance is pooled risk, not guaranteed payments
DeleteI worked for over 35 years for the same employer. I had health insurance for both myself and my wife and kids the entire time. Until the last 10 years or so, I didn't have to pay for it. And ER visits were only 25-50$.
DeleteWhen I left, I was paying 125$ a week for similar but not quite as good of insurance.
I just turned 60 last month, but since I am on SSD, I am on Medicare, with BC/BS. My wife is 62, and uses Obamacare, which last year, paid all of her premium, but this year, she has to pay 320$ a month. And she has BC/BS, or as my retired Army uncle called it, Double Cross, Royal Shaft. He was in Korea and Vietnam both, and was exposed to chemicals in both wars. I don't remember for sure what it was in Korea, I suspect DDT, but in Vietnam, it was Agent Orange, or Dioxin, I think the proper name was for it.
I have an ex BIL who told me about Agent Orange in Vietnam, and how the choppers would fly over and spray it on forested areas, but the wind would blow it over on to them, it would get on their ponchos, and such. They would come back in a day, maybe two, and everything where they had sprayed was simply gone. Right down to the ground.
My uncle died of lung cancer, and while he was a smoker for most of his life, some in my family wonder if the chemicals had anything to do with it. I have to say, I doubt it, but who really knows? We are all going to die from something, and in the end, I can't say it really matters what it is.
And I agree that something sounds fishy about this guy not getting treated for Covid 19 due to a lack of insurance. The hospitals have been reimbursed for treating patients with this virus for quite some time, by the federal government, or actually, from we the taxpayers. I actually have no problem when the money goes to an actual emergency,and not so that someone can avoid working or growing up.
pigpen51
Black too, they went all out on the sobs for this story. Now, I thought O'bama got everyone that couldn't afford inusrance signed up on the people's dime.
ReplyDelete"Roughly a week or so before he died, Settles confided in his father that he was having congestion in his chest. But he did not immediately go to the doctor or the emergency room, despite his father’s urging."
ReplyDeleteMaybe they could have helped him if he'd been diagnosed earlier. So it's sad that he died, but it's not because he had no insurance. We get people all the time who have not only no insurance, but clearly no means ever of paying even a fraction of their bills. Guess what, we take care of them anyway. (And THIS is why you get billed $40 for an aspirin tablet or shit like that, those of you with insurance. Hospital's got to cover the uninsured/will-never-pay freeriders. Also, if you have insurance, note that you get billed, say $1000 for procedure X. The insurance pays $200, you pay $50 and the bill is considered settled. It's a numbers game.)
China Flu is a real thing and it CAN be very dangerous. It hits some people very very hard, and others not much at all. I do not know if there are identified risk factors for who is likely to be hit hard (apart from the usual things of advanced age, obesity, diabetes, pre-existing lung disease). What I mean is, are there genetic or lab-testable factors? But I haven't been following the corona-chan literature closely. Anyway, one of the scary things about China Flu is that it can do weird stuff to your blood clotting. It is now protocol at many hospitals to check coagulation parameters in COVID19 patients, and initiate anticoagulation early and aggressively if the parameters are even a bit out of whack. I've seen a fair number of chest CT scans that show pulmonary emboli (blood clots) in the lungs that are inconsistent with DVT-caused PE (where a clot travels up from your legs). I have also reviewed papers (submitted for potential publication in medical journals) from China that show the same sorts of weird PEs in corona patients over in Chicom-land.
We have also seen patients come in with advanced heart attacks, causing damage that we haven't typically seen in 20-30 years in the US. In most of the US,if you are having a heart attack, you call 911 and you get ambulanced or airlifted to a cardiac catheterization lab within hours. (This is measured as "door to balloon time".) D2B time is in a few hours in most of the US. Short D2B time means we can save most or all of the heart. But we now have patients having heart attacks who are afraid to call 911 because they don't want to go to hospital, where they are sure they will die of China Flu. My friend the next city over had a woman who showed up in hemodynamic collapse 3 days after a large heart attack. By that time she had a huge VSD (hole between the main pumping chambers of the heart). About 30% of her heart muscle had died and basically turned to mush. The surgeons wouldn't touch her, because there was nothing to sew together. The interventional cardiologists tried something totally off the wall ("off-label") and MacGyvered something that seems to have worked, at least temporarily. But it's crazy third-world shit that basically didn't happen in the US before corona hysteria.
Oh yeah. Got screamed at this morning as I was walking to my office through an empty residential neighborhood. This bearded guy, jogging with an N95 mask on (which is stupid for reasons we've discussed) runs up, recoils like a vampire from the cross when he sees me maskless, dashes across the street and starts yelling at me. I believe he called me an idiot. I am afraid I did not respond well, I called him a jackass. Given the neighborhood (which I can't afford, BTW) and his appearance, it's about 50% odds he's a medical doctor. Sigh.
Nothing says "Thank you, Tricare," like undergoing a $50,000-plus treatment, with my part of the bill totaling $32. Yep, Mr. Settles had other health problems.
ReplyDeleteIt’s kind of a strange system we have, if you are old you have medicare and can get supplements which take care of prescriptions and office visits with a co pay. On the other end there is medicaid with no outlay at all. Qualifying for it varies from state to state. Then you have the working poor who really are in a bind. A $2000 spend down is tough, $7000 could really cut into the heat and groceries.
ReplyDeleteLike you kenny, I am spoiled with having had access to good insurance my whole adult life and I’m in the camp of the folks who want everyone to have access to decent medical coverage, I just dont know how to make that work.
For the last few years I’ve belonged to the surgery of the year club. One year it was nose and throat surgery for bad apnea, next year to repair separated tendons and rotator cuff. Last year I got the big prize, open heart surgery to replace my aortic valve and a extra gift- a stroke during surgery. If I had no or poor insurance I might not be here.
One more anecdote, in march I thought my dog was choking on something he snatched up from the ground and I tried to take it out of his mouth. He bit the hell out of me and I went to the emergency room, needed cleaning out and stitched. Hospital wanted me to give them $2000, which I didnt. They billed my insurance over $4000, insurance payed under $300 and I owe $50. Seems kind of shady to me.
COVID medical costs are free if I remember correctly. They passed that bill. If you get covid the feds pay.
ReplyDeleteAww that age old dilemma, Health insurance or a new boat?
ReplyDelete