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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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 03 2019, @07:00PM (2 children)
What ticks me off is they do not get this.
Adding more middle man, AND gobs more money, and hid all the prices that drove up prices. They like to pretend economics does not exist for them at all.
Then they want to pretend my insurance rates have nearly 100x from the early 90s. If I was paying what I did now for insurance in the 90s I would have 0 co-pay and walk into any place i wanted and they would have covered it. Now I have huge deductibles and about 1/4th the choice I used to have. I know what the insurance rates for the early 90s were too as I worked as a clerk in an insurance firm that sold it. Many of the customers I typed in data for were at MOST 200 bucks a year. These were people in their 80s!
Hillarycare made us have to get a job to have the 'good insurance'. Obamacare put the top onto that and made it so I paid 10x. Now they stand in front of me saying they can fix this shit. They make it worse every time!
I can walk into a place and say 'i will pay cash, today, right now' and almost every single time the price drops from something ridiculous like 5000 dollars to 200 bucks. Even 200 bucks is 'too much' usually.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 04 2019, @12:09AM (1 child)
Had Obamacare included a public option, we likely wouldn't be seeing the continued increase in premiums that we're seeing. Last time I checked, the rate increases had somewhat slowed, but not by enough.
The other issue though is the GOP's continued efforts to undermine the law at every opportunity. Between that and the lack of a public option, the only real choice here is to continue to push for single payer, medicare for all solutions to end the problem forever. I'm not surprised that the GOP is fighting this so hard, having guaranteed medical care available to everybody would greatly weaken the hold that employers have over employees. As well as demonstrating that the government does do somethings better than the private sector.
The worst thing though is that while most people in all parties support the idea, you can't even get most Democrats on board with the importance of real reform to the system. They keep talking about incremental change knowing full well that that means each change will be hard fought and most voters are more concerned with their access and how that will change. Medicare for all is an easy argument to make. Even my former roommate whose father suffered some malpractice in the UK still wouldn't give up the NIH system for what we have in the US.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 05 2019, @10:20PM
My sources say that ACA stopped being a problem to major insurers right at the time they got out of the marketplace plans because they weren't making enough money.
You know, when suddenly the priority became that the ACA had to go, and miraculously the individual mandate was repealed.
That the ACA is costing the mainline insurers money (money, not potential insureds getting it for cheaper) is a nice fat lie at this point.