SuperSatellite

MedFICO: The Doctor Can Screw You Now

// January 19th, 2008 // Health, Life and Times

I woke up this morning from a good night’s sleep, and promptly saw a nightmare. MSNBC is reporting on a new project of the credit industry called “MedFICO.” Go read the article, I’ll wait for you.

Okay. So, I saw this over on Slashdot this morning. If you ever read stuff over there, I am sure you can imagine the discussion that is taking place over the whole thing. I am going to chose to ignore the part of the article that says the scores would be designed to be used only after a patient is given treatment. I do this for these reasons: there are followups, as mentioned, which could be negatively impacted, people will always screw stuff up, and there is no precedent to believe that such a score couldn’t and wouldn’t be abused. Just look at normal credit scores. Hell, landlords these days will do credit checks on people. Why? If they don’t pay, you kick them out. It’s worked for decades. Their credit has nothing to even do with it. It is inevitable that such a score would be used for unscrupulous and unintended reasons reasons. That is what happens with a system desiged to mine private people’s information and sell it to the highest bidder.

Imagine, someone goes to the ER, and gets treated. Hospital bills them and then checks the person’s MedFICO score, and finds out that they are a high risk. The person comes in for a followup, and they are gently “referred” to a non-network health group. If you don’t think that wouldn’t happen, you are clueless as to how the country works. Worse yet, they come in for a follow up, and are quietly assigned a lower priority, and end up sitting for hours waiting while the good scored people go ahead of them. A 15 minute appointment now takes three hours.

The fact that healthcare is in any way tied to a profit margin is the scariest damn thing in the world. Need an MRI? Go ask what it costs. They won’t tell you. Why? Because different people get different prices based on if they have insurance or not. So they will inflate prices by hundreds of percent to cover insurance “processing” fees. It’s gross. People are a consumable commodity for the industry, something to be milked. It’s not about actually helping them (at least, maybe it is to some doctors), because the administrators and support services have one goal: make investors happy. That’s who’s important.

“But Michael, socialized healthcare isn’t any good!” Really? That’s news to me, and Canadians, and most of Europe, and Australians. “B-b-but Michael, the taxes!” Yeah, sucks huh? Tough. You’ll appreciate it that month you’re between jobs without health insurance and are diagnosed with cancer. And that’s not to say that there isn’t a happy medium between socialized and free market health care. But look, we have socialized fire protection, law enforcement, why draw the line there? Why the push back on health? Why are the former two okay, and the latter some crazy taboo? If you screw around, cost those departments unacceptable amounts, there are ways that you can be found culpable for the bill. I’m sure the same could be done in health care. Frankly, I can’t figure out how what they want to do isn’t a violation of HIPAA. My medical billing records are as private as any charts in my opinion.

And so many people think that because doctors come out with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt from school, that somehow gives them a pass on charging high amounts. Pardon the language, but that’s bullshit. The fact that schools charge so much is not the patients’ fault. It’s a problem with the system. The fact that insurance companies and HMOs are there to make money, forcing inflated costs, and not care for people isn’t my fault. The system is dangerous, and it will chew you up, and spit you out, make no mistake about it. That isn’t the burden of the patient though, and so many people accept that it apparently is! We are caught in a cross fire, and unfortunately neither side of the system sees the other, they just see us. This is true in so many other places as well. This is how capitalism fails. Money cannot and should not ever be put ahead of the moral fabric of society. When it is what we have now is the result, and there’s a lot of room for it to get worse.
Don’t worry, the first time someone is denied, or receives second rate health care because of this, it will come under serious fire. And it will happen, have no doubt. The more that you dehumanize a field like health care, the worse that speaks to us as a society.

What would House say?