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In 2003 I required a prescription for painkillers for rheumatoid arthritis so I could obtain employment. Not knowing where else to go, I went to the emergency room of Memorial Hospital. I was charged more than two hundred dollars for a ten-minute visit, in addition to a charge of more then two hundred dollars by the doctor. The total bill only to get a prescription written was more than five hundred dollars. No pills - just the piece of paper to take to a pharmacy where the medicine for one month would cost eighty dollars more. The doctor was an idiot who spent half of our ten-minute visit telling me he wouldn't prescribe narcotics. Fine - I wasn't asking for any, just any common powerful painkiller for acute arthritis. Then he issued a nonrefillable prescription (for Vioxx) so I'd have to go through the same old cutthroat crap a month later. (Thankfully, when I needed another bottle I discovered EmergiCare, where I was charged only sixty dollars for a ten-minute visit. The doctor, at no additional charge, used his intelligence to recognize my poverty - I was twenty pounds underweight - and owned enough common good will to give me a prescription refillable for three months. Let them both be blessed.) Two months later I was again unemployed. I couldn't afford any more pills and couldn't pay the "doctor" and "hospital" fast enough. I had paid about $250 but in the helter-skelter scramble to stay alive I began to miss payments, so they sicced the American Credit Agency on me, which ruined my credit, good until then. As the bills kept rising while I was yet unable to pay, I called social services at the hospital. I was told they couldn't help me because I didn't ask for help at the start. Had I done so I'd have long-since been relieved of this impossible financial burden. But, fool that I am, I intended, as ever, to pay my bills responsibly. (Which antiquated sensibility is the reason I've never used a credit card. I'm careful to in no way be tempted to compromise a frugality which insures no one owns or can force any portion of my independent will. Poverty alone does enough of that as to be unspeakable.) A neighbor of mine was going through the same thing about the same time. She is one of the more savvy poor. Having been on unemployment insurance for several months, she asked for help from social services from the start and paid only ten dollars of her total bill. But I, who have been through hell to pay $250, could not receive assistance precisely because I endeavored to pay anything at all. I am thus being penalized for not being a parasite. Well, that's life. Yet meanwhile my bill has risen again to more than five hundred dollars. I don't have the slightest hope of being able to pay even the preposterous monthly interest. Memorial Hospital is not a hospital - it is a murderous joke of what it pretends to be. And if the doctor I saw is worth $1500 an hour then I'm the Pope. That's not saving life - that's killing it. Memorial Hospital needs to be reconsidered by anyone bearing gifts to the already wealthy until its very comfortable operation can be conducted without wholesale devastation of the striving poor.

                                                               - LT

 

I'm in thorough agreement. But let's not forget the free-riders at the American Credit Agency, which continues to harass you. People enter into collection because they are vacant of spirit, a condition adversarial to the heroic. Because they haven't that wherewithal within themselves to honor they buy shiny cars and nice homes in which to be admired via leeching. This in itself is only a weakness as people variously are in diverse ways. But who work in collection, being indiscriminate, also victimize the desperate, not just the irresponsible. The collections industry is a nest of indifferent hypocrisy for who find that means of "earning" a living convenient to greed and sloth. As for credit card debt, that's what the credit industry is all about - eating who take the bait. I myself am largely vegetarian: not a hunter, at least not of other creatures, including human. I am, however, hunted by credit card companies which never cease to advertise their "services" to me. I don't sympathize with them for debts owed to them because it is not credit they want to hand me. They couldn't care less about credit in any shape. It is my victimization that they want because that is how they profit. Who would do well for themselves at my devastation are no friends of mine. So the spirit of whose profits are in collection is now unveiled. Who would seek judgment against you are themselves worse than worthless. But they look good in a world where appearance is everything and substance nothing. Indeed, perhaps they are the cattle who expectedly hunt as the hunters pursue beyond.

 

As for doctors and institutions such as of which you wrote, their outrageously unreasonable fees are largely determined by insurance companies. Why there is so little outcry against the insurance industry is beyond me. They rig, they manipulate, they pretend, they dissemble, they extort, they lie, they stifle competition, they inflict poverty, they prevent people from finding work, they add to the burden of many who do work, they use police for goons, they suck the air out of freedom, they are an unspoken trust, they do as they please, which is largely robbery, because they're as married to the government as is the Federal Reserve that is a system of private banks. All with the blessing of the inhabitants of Oz. The insurance industry is white collar crime par excellence because crime par excellence is crime that is legal. But the insurance industry has done even better than that. Not only are its enormous profits enforced by law (auto insurance) but there is no way to address wrongdoing. Indeed, insurance companies can do no wrong, so comfortable, distracted, gullible or helpless is the public. The insurance industry is as great a tyrant as the financial industry, but tyranny is an odd thing. It is what people fight to resist during war. It is what people seek during peace.

 

                                                               - Vio

Other rip-off schemes posing as legitimate (such as the entire auto insurance industry) may be searched at RIP-OFF Report and Worldwide Scam Network. Statistics on credit card debt recent enough to lend a notion at msn and yahoo. See also Internet Scams.

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