Anti-Debt Agenda Heroes #4 – Karl Denninger
Karl Denninger has maintained a lively blog called Market Ticker. He is a tech-industry entrepreneur who writes bluntly about politics, technology, and individual rights.
If you combined Bernie Sanders with Rush Limbaugh, you might have Karl Denninger.
He often speaks about health care…..and on the Market Ticker post of 3-30-2017, he proposed a series of laws to “clean up” the health sector. These still sound good today!
Here are the regulations he would propose:
1. All providers must post, in their offices and on a public website, a full and complete price list which shall apply to every patient.
2. For a bill to be valid and collectible, it must be affirmatively consented to in writing — with a disclosure of the actual price to be charged prior to the service being performed or the good furnished, subject only to the emergency exception.
3. Any bill that is increased, or has items added to it after consent is obtained, is deemed fraudulent and void.
4. A bill is also void if it contains any open-ended promise to pay without an actual price listed for each service or good prior to customer consent. Having a customer sign a consent form while under the influence of drugs – as occurs while you’re being wheeled into the OR – does not create a valid bill.
(Hospitals will of course squawk that they cannot operate like this as they “can’t” figure out what is required until after the fact but that’s false; nothing prevents them from advertising “Appendectomy: $2,000” and that being the soup-to-nuts price. In fact that’s exactly what the Surgery Center of Oklahoma does today — quite clearly it both can and does work.)
5. Some patients who have medical emergencies may not have insurance or savings to pay any bills.
In that case,
The treating hospital/ER shall bill the US Treasury for the lawful charges incurred, and the provider shall be paid by the government within 30 days.
However, this is not a guarantee of free care.
An invoice will be sent to the taxpayer in question.
If the bill(s) are not paid in full within 90 days then the debt becomes a tax lien subject to collection exclusively from (a) refundable tax credits, which may be garnished at up to 100%, (b) tax refunds, which may be garnished at up to 100%, (c) other entitlement checks excluding Social Security which may be garnished at a rate of no more than 25%.
Statutory interest at 110% of the current 1-year Treasury bill rate shall be applied on any remaining balance until paid in full.
Note: There are many intelligent reader responses on his blog in 2017…check it out.
I like the directness of Denninger’s approach to medical costs. He properly stresses the role of the law in allowing so much health care extortion.