Health Care credit scores?

Just in case you needed another reason to think the American health care system is broken, try this: the consumerist is reporting that a credit rating system is in development to assess people's ability to pay their medical bills. The concerns raised by this are, I think obvious, and include the question of whether you would receive lower quality care if your credit rating were low.

First. I have to say that when typing in this new comment box, my font is microscopic!! And the choices... what is this... a faux-democracy?? And for those of us stubborn enough to not use FireFox, where, oh where, is the spell check?!

But to the MedFICO issue... as much as I think a socialized medicine system is really the best answer, I would have to say that equating a credit-type score with medical care coverage could be tried, but it will fail miserably (after thousands suffer and probably die).  There are, though soft, mechanisms in place currently that really prevent this explicitly.  Unfortunately, we see already that it doesn't work all that well at the health plan level, but it does provide some level of protection--if you know how to fight it.

I can pretty much assure you that as I type, there is a greedy, money-hungry regulatory agency ready to semi-pounce (if they didn't help create it themselves) on this... and that brings me to the quandry I find myself in daily in my own job... you pay the regulatory agency to review you and give you a seal of approval--does that not present a conflict of interest to the regulatory agency? Hence, it is a soft system... like having the fox watch the chickens, if we are into bad cliches... and it seems this morning that I am.

Comment box font size: check! I even changed the background color, to reduce the whiteness of the page. So far that's all I got tho - the buttons are on my list. Spell checking... we'll see.

I wasn't complaining really :)