[William Terrell]

This is what I notice. It seems to be true from my experience.

The cost of the insurance is high because health care, especially hospital care, charges are high.

Doctor visits are usually not so bad, unless lab tests are ordered. It is the lab tests that are high.

Doctor visits are usually not so bad, unless he must do a procedure or make a decision that can land him in court. It is the cost of the malpractice insurance that is high.

Hospital, labs and other businesses that process medical data and tissue in some way, and even the medical insurance industry itself, are the reason health care is so expensive.

The question seems to be, just what are a hospital's cost of labor and materials that justify charging $4.00 for something you can buy at the PDQ for two and a half cents?

Or, if the raw materials used by these businesses are costly, exactly what costs the manufacturer or jobber so much? How much could it cost to make a 5-0 suture?

[daviddennis]

Or just look at the room rate.

Should it cost $680 a night to spend time in a room that resembles a Motel 6, shared with one other customer with only the feeblest attempts at providing privacy?

And a shared phone and cable TV that cost amounts that would make your larcenous cable operator blush in admiration?

Seems to me that hospitals should be cleaning up, and yet everyone says they're losing money like crazy.

And this is true even in areas with few to no illegal aliens, so I don't think this is the problem here.

Anyone know what is?

D

[Fairview]

It isn't that the suture or the box of tissues really costs the hospital so much; they're just charging you, and/or your insurance carrier, if you have one, a lot because in that way they recoup the cost of treating all those indigent cases. If you don't have insurance (and Medicaid counts as insurance) you will be charged even more, since the insurance company has negotiated a lower rate.

The high charges also cover the cost of building that new wing and buying the fantastic new equipment in the radiology suite, which is the biggest expense in any hospital. And the new imaging equipment is costly because hundreds of millions of bucks in corporate research funding went into developing it. Those aren't Brownie cameras they're taking pictures of your brain with.