Man Robs Bank of $1 To Get Health Care In Jail

f1vlad writes "A 59-year-old man has been jailed in Gastonia, N.C., on charges of larceny after allegedly robbing an RBC Bank for $1 so he could get health care in prison. Richard James Verone handed a female teller a note demanding the money and claiming that he had a gun, according to the police report."

Re:Sad, but I can see doing it too

[Hazel Bergeron]

So what you're saying is that he'll have to commit a more serious crime?

Re:Sad, but I can see doing it too

[redemtionboy]

I don't really see other countries with universal care as "developed" in contrast to the US. Sure, they provide care to more people, and in the short term, things look great. But the reality is that none of these nations handle the real issue that is straight in the face of the US, rising healthcare costs. Universal care in other countries doesn't fix this. They just make someone else pay for it. In Japan, over 50% of the hospitals operate in the red. In Germany, doctors are forced to take substantially lower wages than in comparative countries, which has led to a number of protests consisting of tens of thousands of doctors and contributed to Germany's immigration deficit.

The US system sucks, but it's a lot easier to fix than in these other nations. Currently we have a corporatist system that favors corporations and restricts the freedom of the consumer. Government has picked winners and losers and restricted the consumer from making decisions on their own.. If you want to get lower prices and better care, you need to take the restrictions off of the individual and give them the same benefits and freedoms that an employer gets. By not endorsing HMOs and taking the restrictions off of HSAs, we allow increased competition in the market which leads to lower prices. We can see this actively working in areas of the medical field where people pay mostly cash for services such as ophthalmology or cosmetic surgery. Increased competition has resulted in significantly lower prices than in comparative medical fields.

With an HSA, I am in charge of my treatment and spending, and it matters. When I had an HMO, I went to the first place on the list that my health insurance provider recommended. I didn't care about the cost, because all I had to worry about was the copay. But now that I have an HSA, I am responsible for paying that first $2500 of my medical expenses out of my pocket. Now, that $2500 + my premium is still substantially cheaper than the HMO premiums I would be paying, but by making me consciously in charge of my medical expenditures, I am going to avoid paying as much of that $2500 as possible. I needed to get a sleep study done, and I called several places and found quotes ranging from $1000 to $3000. That's a huge difference in price. Active competition in the market rewards those with the better offers and punishes those who are overpriced. We don't have that in the US system. we instead run a system of corporatism where there is no direct competition and there are no negotiable prices. This is not capitalism. This is corporatism.

If you want to help people, the real answer is to lower the cost of medical care. This is the only real long term solution. Everything else just delays the inevitable.

Re:Sad, but I can see doing it too

[Sir_Sri]

$1500 is a lot when you're out of work. And more to the point, how often can that 1500 re-occur? Admittedly I'm in canada so we don't treat people like they'll have to pay out of pocket. But my best friend at 29 had cancer. He was admitted, sent home, re-admitted to hospital several times in a week, and 3 times in one day. It wasn't even that the hospital was trying to be rid of him, he just had a lot of different parts of his body failing in different ways and they'd solve one problem, send him home (because the feeling is you recover better at home) and 2 days later something else would go wrong.

He's sorted out health wise now. But that's beside the point. If you end up in hospital multiple times in a month, how often will your insurance re-bill you.

What does "full coverage" mean? Prescription drugs? Do you have a co-pay? If you have a deductible of 1500 in hospital care (or something like that) it's certainly not 'full'. What if you go to a hospital in a different city than where you live? Does your insurance company approve (or not) of places you can go? Also, under what conditions can they drop your coverage. That was the trick with my friend, as he learned through friends in various support groups. In the US the first time you get cancer you're probably covered by insurance. But the moment they think you're cured for 3 months they drop your ass like a rock, and no one else will touch you with a 100 metre, I'm sorry, foot, pole, and then you're in deep shit.

Re:Sad, but I can see doing it too

[gutnor]

Anyways, it's not that expensive

Is my sarcasm detector broken or the shittiest, most expensive coverage I have ever heard of is really considered "not that expensive" in the US ?

Re:Sad, but I can see doing it too

[funkylovemonkey]

About six years ago I developed a kidney stone that refused to pass. I was right out of college, had just lost my health coverage and did not have a job with insurance. The pain was chronic and possibly dangerous (I won't go into the details but also fairly rare). Finally I went to my local hospital and paid out of pocket. After four or five visits along with a CT scan and a trip to the emergency room (and about six hundred dollars in hospital bills) they finally told me that I needed lithotripsy to destroy the stone. Because I had no insurance the cost of them blasting the stone in an out patient operation (basically going into the hospital that morning and being kicked to the curb by lunch) was roughly 8000 dollars. Instead I flew to Germany where a weeks stay in the hospital and two lithotripsy operations (because the stone did not break up the first time) along with x-rays, ultrasounds and other tests cost me 3000 dollars. Add in a plane ticket that cost about 600 and I paid less then half to fly across the world to get the operation done then I would have paid here in the states (even worse, if I had to have two operations in the states the total would have been 16,000, whereas the German doctors only charged me a few hundred more for a few more days in the hospital). I had grown up hearing all my life about the horrors of socialized medicine. About long waits and incompetent care. What I experienced was the opposite. I had longer waits in US hospitals (including a two hour wait for a CT scan, I never waited more then half an hour for anything in Germany). What shocked me more was how brazenly I was treated by the doctors here in the US, who seemed almost uninterested in what I had to say and were more interested in getting me out of their office. I also had the unfortunate experience in the US during this time of having one of my samples switched with someone else's and had the doctor (erroneously) call me into the office to tell me I had Hepatitis C. I wasn't amused.

Re:Reintegration -- a sop

[elrous0]

Releasing the sex offenders in most states is the cruelest punishment of all. Most of those guys can't even legally live almost anywhere in the state. Saw a story [cnn.com] a while back about a group of them who had took to living under a bridge because they couldn't legally rent any apartment in their city. Not much of a chance for those who legitimately want to go straight and lead a crime-free life. The state is basically guaranteeing that its released criminals will have to turn to crime, just to survive. If that's all that awaits them, the state shouldn't be releasing them (it's cruel to the prisoners and endangers the public).