Here’s a cheerful article from Forbes, official journal of the cluelessly over-privileged — there’s been an upswing of hospitals suing patients who are unable to pay their bills.

According to the Charlotte Observer, over a five year period (2005 to 2010), North Carolina hospitals – most of which are tax-exempt non-profits – filed more than 40,000 lawsuits against patients with overdue bills. In at least one stunning example of patient-engagement, the article highlighted a bill collector who told an elderly woman “You have the right to remain silent.” Most of the lawsuits wind up against people that were uninsured – a category that typically pays the highest possible retail rate for healthcare services.

You’ll love this part:

In another example of aggressive collections – this time reported by the New York Times – debt collectors are starting to appear earlier in the healthcare process – including bedside in the ER. One organization, publicly traded Accretive Health is “embedding collectors as employees in emergency rooms and demanding that patients pay before receiving treatment.”

Whatever you do, don’t leave home without proof of insurance, if you have it. Consider having your policy information tattooed on your body somewhere, just in case. Otherwise, if you are unconscious, you could die before the hospital figures out who you are and whether you are insured.

But get this graph (click to enlarge):

Click to Enlarge

This is from the American Hospital Association, and it’s showing us the billions of dollars of unpaid bills hospitals are stuck with every year. And the thing I wish someone could get across to baggers and wingnuts and everyone else who doesn’t want to pay for “entitlements” is — we’re all paying those bills.

The average U.S. family and their employers paid an extra $1,017 in health care premiums last year to compensate for the uninsured, according to a study to be released Thursday by an advocacy group for health care consumers.

Families USA, which supports expanded health care coverage, found that about 37% of health care costs for people without insurance — or a total of $42.7 billion — went unpaid last year. That cost eventually was shifted to the insured through higher premiums, according to the group.

And of course this is a stupid, cost-inefficient way to pay for health care for the poor. A lot of those dollars represent uninsured people who didn’t seek medical help until some long-festering health problem was becoming critical, and also more expensive to treat. In theory, it ought to take less money out of our pockets to simply pay for health care for the poor with tax dollars, giving the poor better access to preventive and care for chronic illnesses.

But instead, too many of us scream stupidly about taxes and don’t notice that we’re already paying for this stuff, and we’re going to pay one way or another. Pretending that we aren’t paying for it is kind of stupid.

This is the sort of thing that makes me crazy.

I spoke with an older woman for a while who will vote for Obama because she’s as much a radical feminist as any Catholic nun, although she was really concerned about the health care law. She believes Democrats cut Medicare, probably because conservatives and media spent two years telling her Democrats cut Medicare. I asked her if she had noticed any cuts in Medicare and she said “no” and then we just stood there looking at each other.

The ACA found ways to cut Medicare spending but not Medicare benefits. Mittens is on record as planning to shove seniors into the private insurance market with a “premium support” voucher that will not be allowed to increase as much as health care costs are expected to increase.

Another good read:

“Tucker Carlson’s Downward Spiral“

Here’s a chart I found at the Kaiser Foundation site (source):

Once again, we see that most people like what’s in the ACA (except for the mandate), but don’t know what’s in the ACA.

Yesterday I ran into some articles saying that if the ACA is struck down or repealed, all hell will break loose in the health care system. See “How An ‘Obamacare’ Repeal Would Take Medicare And The Rest Of The Health Care System With It” and “If The Health Care Overhaul Goes Down, Could Medicare Follow?”

All those seniors who are now getting free preventive care exams and better pharmaceutical benefits would lose them in a twinkle if the ACA goes down. I wonder how many of them actually understand that?