Ripping the disabled.

A lot of disable kids need special things to help out. Modified stollers and car seats. Often these things need to be custom made and can run a lot of money. There are stroller and car seats that can easily run $800. Outrageous but understandable because the of the individual needs of each kid.

But there are also complete rip offs masquerading as things you need for disabled kids. I've seen foam stairs that are $300 on a website for special needs kid that run less than $100 at a gymnastics site. I've seen $30 spandex type suits (helps with the tone for CP kids) that become $300 suits, once the manufacturer figured out it could bill this stuff to insurance. Toys at special needs websites routinely run much more than they do with a little digging. Instead of making things readily available to this vulnerable population, the game seems to be marketing to these people as suckers or people that don't worry about cost control because the equipment is going to be billable to insurance. I find something very twisted about this, but I don't know how to change any of that. I guess the good capitalist argument is that I have choices, which is true to some extent, but I still get upset at corporations taking advantage to charge unreasonable profits on these things.

To extend on this thought a little. Medicaid and Medicare do cost a lot of money and they do need to be reformed. But the answers are not government management vs. insurance management. The answer is really more about cost control. There are people bilking the system. Just yesterday, one large health provider accused another one of admitting patients unnecessarily because it could recoup more money once patients were admitted. And the government ends up paying a lot of this.

More on bashing Paul Ryan's ridiculous plan some other time.