Study: Hospitals are ripping off people
By Nina Liss-Schultz, Mother Jones
The United States has long been known to have one of the most expensive hospital systems in the world, and now a study indicates that hospitals are overcharging patients for medical services.
According to the study published Monday by National Nurses United, the largest nurses’ organization in the United States, the price of many services has skyrocketed since the mid-’90s. Many hospitals have set charges at 10 times their cost. The 100 most expensive hospitals in the country, for example, in 2011 charged 765 percent of their costs, or $765 for every $100 of total costs.
Charles Idelson, a spokesman for NNU, says that even insured patients, whose insurance providers will offset some of the costs, will be affected by the price hikes. “The skyrocketing prices make premiums, co-pays and deductibles go up,” Idelson says. Another recent study, by the Commonwealth Fund, found that “high deductibles and cost-sharing, along with no limits on out-of-pocket costs” may explain why even insured people struggle to afford health care.
The health insurance companies are very much to blame for this. In many cases, the hospitals and insurance companies are one in the same. This could be the biggest rip off in world history.
Blame your wonderful government. They force doctors and hospital to accept welfare and Medicare patients at below their cost to provide the services. For instance a welfare patient, that is a Medicaid patient, we don’t want to hurt their tender feelings do we, has the taxpayer pay X amount for a service while a Medicare patient, whose paycheck deductions have prepaid for their medical care, pays 2X and the poor schnook who pays cash pays 3X or 4X. And don’t forget all hospitals must see emergencies without regard to ability to pay or legal status. This unholy mess was brought to you by the your elected officials.
This intellectual dishonesty will only get worse as we continue to import poverty and export jobs and send jobs overseas.
Is it any wonder hospitals and physicians cheat on billing and services rendered.
And don’t forget Medicare has a 10 to 25 percent fraud rate, which President Obama said he would stop to finance Obamacare. Never happened, never will.
Blame whomever you want. It’s time to get the ever skyrocketing middleman profit out of sickcare. Bring healthcare to the more optimal goal of promoting well being through healthy living and patient education thereof, providing care for those who really need it, and focusing on results not expensive treatments and endless prescriptions, tests and procedures. Single payer now.
Not Born,
Did you think this out? No matter how healthy you live, or as you say “promote well being”, you will still die and that process is the cost center of the issue.
How do you use that as an argument for single payer? To me that makes no sense at all.
that hospitals charge insurance companies (and actually more so the uninsured) more than they would because of medicare is only a half-truth created by medical care billing departments. They charge them more because they can (see what happens to you if you are uninsured and actually have any money you can be taken to collection for). CJ is right, unless you live your whole life in good health and then just drop dead from your first heart attack, your later life is going to incur medical expenses.
But that doesn’t take away from the fact that universal contributions to medical expense coverage supported by premiums and /or taxes combined with a single payer system that drives down the cost of medical services is the only system that can actually work from a financial perspective. Although there are exceptions, generally people just can not shop for medical services like they do for a TV set. This hinders a free market solution. It’s made more difficult in those areas serviced by just one hospital, as here in SLT. Also, single payer would eliminate the unnecessary use of ERs. Why do people go to ER’s – because the doctor they might see does not accept their insurance or they don’t have any. (lack of education doesn’t help either)
Most of the developed world uses such a system, and they live as long and as healthily as we do. The one big difference is most of their medical professionals don’t go into the medical field to be rich, but to make a decent living and have a rewarding profession.
By the way Mr Suspicious, it seems your suspicions don’t extend to what you hear on Fox TV…hospitals DO NOT have to treat uninsured people (See the Emergency Medical Treatment and and Active Labor Act of 1986). It’s only a requirement if they want to participate in Medicare and Medicaid. Almost every hospital in the country accepts Medicare and Medicaid – so what does that tell you? It tells you that most hospitals make money for the services they get paid for under those programs, and they even make enough of it to cover the cost of the uninsured.
We need a single payer system to control costs, and cut out the siphoning off of money by middle men (insurance companies).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_health_insurance_coverage
We really are alone compared to other developed countries, I don’t think any other country is doing it our way. Personally I’m tired of paying at least 1/3 of my income for healthcare costs, I think it’s a grossly overpriced system, that has the citizens over a barrel, you want to live don’t you? Well than pay up!
….
The middle man in our health care system is the government. In fact, middle men, beginning men, and yes, end men.
You want a better health system? Then get the weak link out. The Government. Look what it has led to.
40 years of increasing government control focused on maintaining the employer provided insurance delivery system.
When we want to fix the system it starts here,
We need to find a way to exempt insurance from cross state boarder sales restrictions and make it portable, i.e. tied to the insured. The way it is now, primarily tied to the employer is no longer effective.
Of course tort reform is also an issue that needs to be addressed.
Another area government has gone amuck with….
The people who have government healthcare have the least worries, it’s us poor saps in the private system, that are paying through the nose. I dread every time I have to access the healthcare system, the bills roll in for months after, and then you learn how little you are actually covered.
Tort reform should be part of a cleaned up system. Our healthcare system should be about keeping our citizens in good health, not providing an opportunist system to be manipulated for profit.
Bring on socialized medicine! I’m all for it!
From here America gets even worse….
Hospitals and the entire healthcare system is being upended and made much worse than it was.
New questions emerging….
Did Obamacare make deals to bailout the insurance companies?
This is how Marxist countries work, behind the door deal with select cronies.
Must we have studies to prove what we already know?
Julie, these useless studies are all government funded through grants. Redundant, worthless expenditure of money that could be better spent elsewhere if it weren’t for crony politics.
ljames, thank you. I could not of said it better myself. And the wiki link care provides says it all — Obviously our system is not “better”
Conservatives will never admit that our system is the worst in the first world.
All of the ‘marxist’ systems are better, and the people are healthier.