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
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 03 2019, @05:49PM
Or for-profit prisons, or fire control, or allowing the ex-tobacco industry to dominate the retail grocery supply chain.
Good business is where you find it, for as long as you can get away with it, and when it grows to the proportion of for-profit basic healthcare - you may as well be negotiating with the coast guard when they are pulling you off a sinking ship in stormy seas...
What if, in addition to taxes, businesses had to report their human impact: number of jobs provided, income paid to those employees, actual (leaving home until returning home) time worked by those employees, working conditions for those employees (life safety, health safety, stress), and their impact on their customers: how are they helping people in the world? And their suppliers, and their environmental impact. Collect that baseline data for 4 years, then spend the next 4 years hammering out tax incentives based on business impact.
Want to charge $3500 per dose for Epi-pens? Sure, you can do that, but your negative quality of life impact on your customers (the ones dying because they can't afford a product that's cheap to make) should result in an increased $2000 per dose tax - which can be provided to a competitor as an incentive to give generic Epi-pens away for free.
🌻🌻 [google.com]