mtl008 Chapter 3234 The Shadow of Faraines (31)
Chapter 3234 The Shadow of Faraines (31)
Chapter 3234: The Shadow of Faraines (Thirty-one)
Among Bruce's list, many people have recently moved to this community. The reason they moved here is very simple. Most of them became poor due to illness.
It may be difficult for many people to imagine how high the medical bills in the United States are. To sum it up in the simplest terms, even if you are a billionaire, it only takes one night to fall back into poverty due to illness.
Some people may think this is an exaggeration, but in fact, the cost of medical bills in the United States has completely exceeded the normal range.
For example, in major cities on the east coast of the United States, the normal cost of entering a hospital for a consultation is about a few hundred dollars.
Please note that this is only the consultation fee, which means it will cost several hundred yuan for you to see the doctor.
After you have asked about your own situation and decided to undergo treatment, you will be charged separately based on the different drugs and instruments used. The most common CT scan without any insurance reimbursement will cost about US$6000-8000.
When you spend this money to take the X-ray and then take it to see a doctor, you will have to spend several hundred dollars on consultation fees.
And when the doctor makes the next treatment plan for you based on what's on the film, you still need to pay separately.
For example, if you have a broken bone and need treatment, in addition to paying for the materials, you also have to pay the doctor who treats you, and pay extra for each follow-up check. When the wound has healed and it is confirmed that the splint can be removed, you still have to pay the consultation fee and operation fee.
The whole process doesn't sound too outrageous, but the problem is that if each link costs several thousand dollars, then for a simple fracture treatment, the medical bill you will get is about 6 to 8 US dollars.
This is just the cost of ordinary medical treatment. If it is an emergency, the cost will be about 5 to 8 times higher.
Some people will definitely think that if this is so outrageous, then all Americans will die of illness at home.
But in fact they raise the bills to this level just to force people to buy insurance.
Taking the insurance of American universities as an example, after purchasing various comprehensive insurances, the bill will be reduced to about one twentieth. If the cost of insurance is included, the amount you need to pay is about 5% to 10% of the medical bill.
Although it is outrageous to spend thousands of dollars for a fracture, if it is just a common inflammation or a cold, the cost is within the affordability of ordinary people.
But this is only an ideal situation. In most cases, ordinary people cannot afford very comprehensive insurance. There are many very expensive instruments that are not covered by any insurance company. You can only pray that you don’t get a disease related to the instrument, otherwise the bill will be very scary.
The most outrageous thing is that many instruments and drugs are only available in designated hospitals. Suppose you bought package A, but the hospital you went to for your first visit used instrument B, then I'm sorry, the cost of the instrument will not be reimbursed.
If you want to get the instrument fee reimbursed, you have to find a hospital that has instrument A, but the fee for the first consultation will not be reimbursed.
After arriving at a hospital with instrument A, there are too many people using this instrument and you need to wait in line, so you can only wait. If you don’t want to wait, you have to find a hospital in another state that has this instrument.
However, the cost of using this device in other states is not reimbursed.
The instruments and other things are fine, but the key is the medicine. If you buy insurance from a certain company, you can only use certain brands of medicine. If such medicine is not available, you can buy it in other states, but the out-of-pocket expenses will not be reimbursed.
I believe many people have already seen the trick. If one state is chosen among five states to sell a certain type of drug, and the other four states do not sell it, and this drug is relatively common and has a high profit margin, then residents of the other four states can only come to this state to buy this drug.
The insurance purchased by residents of the other four states covers this drug, but this state does not, so it cannot be reimbursed. The only state that has this drug does not include this drug in any insurance contract, so it still cannot be reimbursed.
The insurance companies that rule these five states made the money without any further ado.
This is just the simplest method of grafting. Almost every sentence in the complicated insurance contract is a trap. When it comes to seeing a doctor, almost no American can get perfect reimbursement. Most of them just report some and give up some, just to make back the insurance money.
Even so, about one-third of Americans cannot even earn back the insurance money they paid, which is basically equivalent to never having a successful claim for reimbursement.
Some people may say, this insurance is so deceptive, why should we buy it?
But if you don't buy it, the hospital has raised the bill to an outrageous astronomical figure because of its cooperation with the insurance company. As mentioned before, any minor illness will cost tens of thousands of dollars, which no one can afford.
The American medical system is a capital letter of "the lesser of two evils". If you buy it, it may not be reimbursed, and if you don't buy it, you can't afford to get sick. In this case, you can only take a gamble and spend the insurance money.
Apparently, Siltec Medical Insurance Company has done this a lot. Bruce just did a random search on the Internet and found five or six hundred complaints related to insurance payment services in this city, and all of them occurred within this year.
After screening, Bruce found about forty or fifty families who received no compensation at all and fell into poverty as a result, most of which involved lives.
Generally speaking, hospitals will treat patients first and collect money later, and send the bill after the treatment is completed. However, the first course of treatment is also called treatment, but people who have encountered strange events cannot be cured in one or two courses of treatment.
Without subsequent insurance benefits, it would be impossible to pay for the first course of treatment, let alone follow-up treatment, and you would be kicked out of the hospital and leave your life to fate.
This is the situation at the home of Ms. Theresa, whom Bruce just visited. Her daughter encountered a strange incident and suffered extensive burns all over her body, but the insurance company refused to pay compensation because the insurance situation was not clearly defined.
The reason for refusing compensation is probably that, although she did encounter a strange incident, her burns had nothing to do with the strange incident. It was because someone accidentally set the curtains on fire while escaping, and Ms. Theresa's daughter did not run away immediately. It was not directly caused by the monster, so no compensation will be paid.
That’s right, in insurance contracts in most states in the U.S., if you fail to proactively avoid danger in a timely manner when you have the opportunity to do so and do not receive compensation, you may even be sued for insurance fraud.
In order to treat her daughter's illness, Ms. Teresa spent all the family savings and divorced her husband. Her life fell into a slum, so she had to move from a middle-class community to a slum.
There are probably more than sixty victims like Ms. Theresa this year, all of whom have accepted the situation silently.
It’s not that they want to admit it. The key point is that this situation is too common. It’s basically impossible to find a person in the United States who has not experienced this.
While carrying out the Gotham transformation project, in order to improve people's livelihood, Bruce also wanted to introduce better insurance business to Gotham, but the whole process was a mess and the result was a mess.
It has indeed been introduced, but it only improved the situation where no insurance company dared to provide insurance to Gotham residents. As for the packages and terms, there are no discounts at all.
Even a super-rich man like Bruce, who has the most professional team of lawyers, would find it difficult to gain an advantage in a dispute with the legal representatives of medical insurance companies. At most, it would end in a tie, and he would still have to make concessions.
After all, after the decline of American manufacturing, the status of manufacturing and industrial giants such as the Wayne Group has gradually declined. Even if the Wayne Group is still a military-industrial complex, it is almost gone, so it can't be called a complex at all.
Even Bruce Wayne would find it difficult to get money out of the mouths of the medical insurance giants, let alone ordinary people.
This group of people wanted to confess, but Bruce had no intention of letting them. Although there were not many of them, the situations they encountered were very extreme. Many of them faced the death of their loved ones, and it had not been long since the incident, so those extreme emotions had not been fully digested.
Bruce and the Pale Knight wore expensive suits, famous watches and brand-name jewelry, and went from house to house, making all kinds of sarcasm and ridicule, filling their homes with hatred.
Bruce also revealed, intentionally or unintentionally, that Sirtek Sr. would participate in a news interview, and said that in addition to Sirtek Sr., there would also be well-known hosts and experts in the medical insurance industry, as well as many reporters with sharp writing styles.
After completing his task, Bruce parked the luxury car back to its original location, drove the original pickup truck, came to the park next to the news broadcasting center, and found a secluded place to park the car.
He walked around and found that many reporters were already there. They parked their cars near the TV and broadcasting center, opened half of the windows, and scanned the passers-by with their sharp eyes like hawks.
Bruce and the Pale Knight, two men dressed quite upper class, immediately caught their attention.
Bruce and the Pale Knight walked into a coffee shop, and almost immediately, a hooded man walked out of a black car parked on the side of the road with a square microphone in his hand.
A woman in a business suit also walked out from the street across from him. The two exchanged glances and looked at Bruce and the Pale Knight standing at the front desk of the coffee shop.
Bruce ordered two cups of coffee and sat down by the window, afraid that others would not see him. After a while, a woman in professional attire came over with a smile and said, "Good afternoon, are you from the TV broadcast center?"
Bruce looked at the woman, deliberately kept his eyes on her delicate makeup for two seconds, and then said enthusiastically: "No, ma'am, we are staff from the public relations department of Siltec Medical Insurance Company..."
The woman's eyes immediately flashed with a gleam of light, and she said, "I'm a TV host. The window seats are full. Can I share a table with you?"
"Of course, this afternoon is made even better by having a beautiful lady like you," Bruce said, leaning his hands on the table and staring at the woman's face without blinking.
The woman sat down and smiled at the coffee-delivering staff. Then she turned around and said, "Your boss has an interview tomorrow morning. He should be well prepared, right? Actually, I've just been transferred here for a short time and haven't met such a big shot yet. It's inevitable that I'm a little nervous."
"Oh, I'm fine, ma'am. Our boss is a very approachable person. He even arranged for me to appease some customers who didn't get insurance compensation today..."
The woman's eyes lit up and she said, "Calm down? How do you calm down?"