Healthcare credit cards are stirring debate

[Anonymous]

Just when you think you've seen it all. Can you believe credit cards you can only use within your healthcare network or perhaps only at a specific doctor's office.

http://www.star-telegram.com/business/story/284338.html

As the price of healthcare keeps rising, health insurers are offering cash-strapped consumers a new way to pay their bills -- credit cards that only can be used for medical expenses.
...
the health cards often come with fees and high interest rates after the grace period for payment is over.
...
The HumanaAdvance card, with a $96 annual fee, will be promoted to all employees of companies that offer a high-deductible consumer-driven health plan, even workers who don't have Humana coverage.
...

Humana, Aetna and UnitedHealthcare are apparently three who are issuing such cards.

Now, you can pay it back interest free over 6 months via payroll deduction. For that alone, I'm interested. I have coverage through United. Coupled with my medical FSA account, this can help me.

But this is fire that can burn you. And it's new so people might not be fully up to speed on it and they just sign without reading.

[fused]

This is awful! It's not surprising that two of the most sleazy and least regulated industries combine forces. I'm sick of insurance companies crying about rising healthcare costs when providers and facilities reimbursements are heading toward $0. Now they want to go after those who can't afford health insurance and have them pay interest as well.

[Anonymous]

What won't they think of next? A health care "store card". lol

[Anonymous]

Can we be long away from a return to company's paying their workers in scrip?

[Anonymous]

And buy their groceries at the company store, and live in company housing?

Not to mention renting company cars for their personal transportation.

[Anonymous]

This is not entirely new.  We have a hospital in my city that's given out CC or lines of credit to those that couldn't pay for years. 

[Anonymous]

I'm edging closer and closer to being an advocate for socializing medicine.

This goes against my overall free-market libertarian ideology, but by any objective measure the system we have now is not working. We pay just about the highest percentage of GDP toward health care of any industrialized nation, yet our results are mediocre. Costs keep soaring while performance remains flat or even declines slowly. At my job, my health insurer wants a 12% increase in premiums--about four times the rate of inflation!--to offer slightly less coverage. This is not an isolated case or a blip...last year there was a 13% increase, and the year before 10%.

Let's face it: if the current U.S. health care system were a government program, conservatives would be all over it like white on rice, citing it as a terrible failure, a bloated, inefficient bureaucracy sucking up tax dollars while producing minimal results, and the Right would be demanding substantial reforms or privatization. From where I sit, a failure is a failure, whether by the government or by the private sector. We should tell the healthcare execs: "Get it right, or we'll shut it down."

Message Edited by TheNewWorldMan on 10-31-2007 08:09 PM