I honestly am not sure how Hospitals or health care providers come up with the prices they do.
One of the hallmarks of an efficient free-market is the ability to compare prices.
Try finding the prices for similar operations in other hospitals in your area.
You can't.
This is one of the reasons that our health care system isn't really "free-market". It is about as dysfunctional, efficiency-wise, as it is possible to get.
Another thing to remember, is that there are a lot of doctor groups that are just associated with a hospital, but not actually employees. That means your billing ends up coming from seven or more en ies. THAT bit makes me point out that something like 25% or so of all the health dollars go into administrative overhead.
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publ...strative-costs
It costs a lot to pay people to be able to fill out claim forms for all the different insurers.
It would be far more efficient to have a single payor system. Dump all the risks into one huge national pool, and let the US government administrate it.
"Dump all the risks into one huge national pool"
ain't NEVER gonna happen in USA, just like the BigInsurance killed public option as soon as ACA discussions got under eay.
The Repugs would block even discussion of "socialized medicine" because it serves, helps the 99% and reduces, limits wealth of the 1%.
iow, BigHealthRacket is just another phallus ing the un able America.
wait...I'm lost now. Is Big Pharma part of BigHealthRacket?
"now"? how about always?
ctoa is leading member of BigLost
LOLZ. Nice one.
Air Ambulances Offer a Lifeline, and Then a Sky-High Bill
Clarence W. Kendall, a rancher in Pearce, Ariz., was moving bales on top of a haystack when he fell eight feet and struck his head on the corner of a truck below. His health insurance covered most of the cost of treating the head trauma caused by the accident.
But there was one bill, for $47,182, that his insurance did not pay.
It came from the company that transported Mr. Kendall in a helicopter ambulance to a hospital in Tucson on the day of the fall, nearly two years ago. “That initial bill nearly gave me a heart attack,” he said. “I thought they’d have to come and get me again.” Mr. Kendall has not paid the charge, which he said was equivalent to a year’s income. As a result, Air Methods, the nation’s largest air ambulance operator, with over $1 billion in revenue last year, is suing him.
a window into one of the most lucrative booms in health care in recent years. Air ambulance companies, which indisputably save lives, often in dramatic cir stances, have consistently raised their rates and aggressively expanded their networks, adding scores of expensive new helicopters.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/06/bu...high-bill.html
Last edited by boutons_deux; 05-11-2015 at 01:19 PM.
Spending more on expensive drugs hasn't led to best in class cancer care. Far from it, the US spends astronomically more for middle of the pack results.
So much for high drug prices driving innovation.
https://gooznews.substack.com/p/litt...-priced-cancerAnyone paying attention to the drug pricing debate over the past few decades has heard Big Pharma’s argument ad nauseum: America’s high drug prices foot the bill for global innovation. If Medicare were to join the rest of the world in negotiating lower prices, innovation would dry up and the latest miracle cures (always on the near horizon) would disappear from view.
No field of medicine has been more prone to this psychological blackmail than cancer care. Desperate patients, their families and the patient advocacy groups that speak in their name (almost all of which receive substantial funding from the pharmaceutical industry) have allowed themselves to be used as an effective roadblock to granting the federal government the right to negotiate lower-priced drugs.
The non-policy has proven extremely costly for U.S. taxpayers, who pick up the tab for Medicare and Medicaid; employers, who pick up about 75% of the cost of private insurance; and privately-insured families, who pick up the rest. Spending on cancer drugs accounted for 37% of the more than $200 billion that the U.S. spent on cancer care in 2020. On a per capita basis, that is more than any other country on earth.
A new study out this week sought an answer to a simple question. Are we getting a bang for all the bucks we spend? Have high prices and a lax regulatory environment, which gives Americans earlier access to the latest innovations in personalized medicine that are coming out of the bio-pharmaceutical industry’s labs (monoclonal antibodies, kinase inhibitors, immune checkpoint inhibitors and the latest new new thing, CAR-T therapy), paid off in better outcomes for the people sick with the more than 100 forms of cancer?
The short answer is no. The study compared cancer spending to cancer outcomes at 22 peer nations in the Organization of Economic Development and Cooperation. The U.S. ranked slightly better than middle-of-the-pack when it came to total deaths from cancer per 100,000 population. U.S. costs, on the other hand, were the highest, although Switzerland, another country that invests heavily in its pharmaceutical industry (Roche and Novartis are among the major players headquartered there), is closing in fast.
“After adjusting for smoking, nine countries had lower cancer care expenditures and (emphasis added) lower mortality rates than the U.S.,” researchers at the Yale School of Medicine and Vassar College found. “Of the remaining 12 countries, the U.S. additionally spent more than $5 million per averted death relative to 4 countries, and between $1 and $5 million per averted death relative to 8 countries.”
Their bottom line: Cancer care expenditures were not associated with cancer mortality rates. “Much of the growth in U.S. cancer drug spending … often confers marginal or unclear survival gains,” they wrote.
The study: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...rticle/2792761
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