It always bothers me when blogs don't include the person name's in the title and just refer to them as "YouTuber". It's less egregious when it's social media like Reddit, but it's different when it's the way they earn a living.
> After receiving a medical treatment that included a round of antibiotics and an X-ray scan, Californian Will Osman thought he got stuck with a $69,000 hospital bill. Luckily, Osman's insurance covered most of the bill, but that still left him on the hook for $2,500.
That's the first sentence of the article. Doesn't that cover that pretty well?
Doesn't really make sense to me. If it would say "Will Osman Builds His Own X-Ray Machine" it doesn't really convey the same message as "YouTuber" which is kinda equivalent to "a regular person" and not a professional x-ray engineer.
And there's no way the insurance company paid $66.5K. The dollar amount on the bill is like the opening of the negotiation, it always starts way high and comes down from there. There's a rule that if an insurance company pays the bill you send them then you undercharged.
It's in the video, the insurance company paid about $8.5k and he paid another $2.5k. So you're absolutely right, that $69k bill turned into $11k pretty quickly.
Because, like every other rage-bait article about healthcare in America, it's a blatant lie.
The article states in addition to the x-ray that "the bill included an abdominal CT scan, medication, and two nights in a hospital room". American hospitals are full of multimillion dollar equipment and trained specialists staffed around the clock.
"The full price" is a fiction relevant only to negotiation of actual price between providers and government/institutional payers, no individual ever pays that. It's an imaginary number used to start price discovery so that the hospital, insurance companies and critically the government medicare/medicaid program can make some set of concessions and discounts so that in the end everyone comes to a "win-win" agreement.
My comment was not intended to indicate whether or not $2.5k is or is not outrageous.
The point of my comment is that $69k was apparently deemed to be sufficiently more outrageous and hence clickbait worthy such that it incentivized the writer to lie about the facts.
No. If I go to a hospital and get things done, and do not give them an insurance card, they can send me a bill for whatever numbers they want, and I am legally required to pay that!
The fact that you can often negotiate when you have a large debt that you are unlikely to pay does not change the fact that the debt is legitimate
Sure, but that is not relevant here because the person in the article did not receive a bill for $69k. My comments were strictly about the “journalist” painting the wrong picture about this specific scenario in order to incite emotion, presumably in order to get more people to click.
This is just how you write headlines though. It's not "<some person you've never heard of> proposes bill", it's "California state senator proposes bill". It's not "<some random engineer> makes new technology", it's "Engineer makes new technology".
I don't think it's related to trying to devalue 'YouTuber' as a profession.
If someone works in legacy media, like network and cable television, printed newspaper or magazine, and they don't clearly see the shift away from print and broadcast media to Internet video, then they're totally behind the curve, and they doing exactly what you always see people in dying prominent institutions do - struggle to maintain relevancy using any method possible. In this case, I would argue, "downplaying" so-called "new media" people.
Sam Harris said it best when explaining why he doesn't make book writing his focus any longer: "I can reach 100,000 people by writing a book, which will take about a year from idea to published hardcover, or I can record a podcast, which will take a day, and reach 500,000 people."
It always bothers me when blogs don't include the person name's in the title and just refer to them as "YouTuber". It's less egregious when it's social media like Reddit, but it's different when it's the way they earn a living.