(If you do not study this entire article, which is part of a Time’s series, you may be deluding yourself concerning public health issues and what you may end up paying when you have need.)
NEW YORK TIMES: …In a medical system notorious for opaque finances and inflated bills, nothing is more convoluted than hospital pricing, economists say. Hospital charges represent about a third of the $2.7 trillion annual United States health care bill, the biggest single segment, according to government statistics, and are the largest driver of medical inflation, a new study in The Journal of the American Medical Association found.
A day spent as an inpatient at an American hospital costs on average more than $4,000, five times the charge in many other developed countries, according to theInternational Federation of Health Plans, a global network of health insuranceindustries. The most expensive hospitals charge more than $12,500 a day. And at many of them, including California Pacific Medical Center, emergency rooms are profit centers. That is why one of the simplest and oldest medical procedures — closing a wound with a needle and thread — typically leads to bills of at least $1,500 and often much more…
In other countries, the price of a day in the hospital often includes many basic services. Not here. The “chargemaster,” the price list created by each hospital, typically has more than ten thousand entries, and almost nothing — even an aspirin, a bag of IV fluid, or a visit from a physical therapist to help a patient get out of bed — is free. Those lists are usually secret, but California requires them to be filed with health regulators and disclosed. … (more)
EDITOR: This article was discussed on C-SPAN. It was pointed out that hospital arbitrarily set exorbitant ‘list prices’ so that they can then claim the difference between what they are actually paid and the asking price as charity. For hospital for profits, this can provide tax benefits.
Also, they use the phony ‘sticker pricing’ for charging insurers that have agreed to a percentage of ‘list’ price.
Pity the patient, in New York, throughout the country and here in Lancaster who doesn’t have insurance and who gets stuck with these outrageously inflated charges. This happens all the time and ruins many a life.
NewsLanc reported on price gouging in a series on Lancaster General Hospital several years ago.
