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posted by martyb on Saturday August 03 2019, @01:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the there-should-be-an-app-for-that dept.

Fountain Valley resident Jennifer Moore makes a really good point.

"When you take your car to the mechanic, they give you a written estimate before they touch it," she told me.

"So why is it that when you go to the hospital, you have no idea how much something will cost until the bill arrives?"

Moreover, why are prices so completely different from one healthcare provider to another?

And why is it that when patients try to find out in advance how much something will cost, they're treated like unwelcome guests rather than equal partners in their own treatment?

[...] The near-total lack of transparency in healthcare pricing is a key reason we have the highest costs in the world — roughly twice what people in other developed countries pay.

Simply put, drugmakers, hospitals, labs and other medical providers face no accountability for their frequently obscene charges because it's often impossible for patients to know how badly they're being ripped off.

[...] Moore's insurer, Cigna, was charged $2,758 by the medical center for the two ultrasounds. However, Cigna gets a contractual discount of just over $1,000 because it's, well, Cigna. All insurers cut such sweetheart deals with medical providers.

That lowered the bill to $1,739. Cigna paid $500. That left a balance of $1,239, for which Mika was entirely responsible because she hadn't met her $1,250 deductible for the year.

Moore quickly ascertained online that the average cost for a pair of ultrasounds is about $500 — meaning the medical center's original $2,758 charge represented a more than 400% markup.

Cigna's lower contractual charge of $1,739 still meant the bill had been marked up more than 200%.

And the $1,239 Mika had to pay was more than twice the national average.

Wait, it gets even worse.

Moore said that after working her way through various levels of customer service in the medical center's billing department, she learned that the cash price for the two ultrasounds was $521.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-07-29/column-could-our-healthcare-system-be-any-dumber


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03 2019, @04:07PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03 2019, @04:07PM (#875176)

    Available care and advancements at the pace the US has set cannot be maintained without paying a whopping fuckload more than the US government takes in in taxes every year. Oh, sure, if your little nation is willing to be a parasite and sponge off US innovation you'll be able to get by for a while with slow, mediocre care

    Sounds like US is a 3rd world country. And the "advancements" are not made by the last-mile of the healthcare system but mostly by the publicly funded researchers. And "available care" is not available, unless you can pay. Like in 3rd world country.

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Health_care_cost_rise.svg [wikimedia.org]

    You are doing something really fucked up when you start at same place and are the only outlier. And not only that, on this group you are the ONLY country without a universal healthcare system.