Posted on 03/03/2010 4:27:18 AM PST by xlib
Rich Umbdenstock, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association, says hospitals mark up prices on medical bills to make up for lower payments the government pays through Medicare and Medicaid.
"They're making up for underpayments elsewhere," Umbdenstock said. "Certainly if you're the patient to whom the cost is being shifted you feel you are paying more than you should. The public programs need to pay their fare share. At the same time hospitals are trying to lower their cost of providing care, so that they don't have as great a gap."
Consider this: For every dollar the nation spends on health care, 50 cents is wasted.
According to a 2008 report by Pricewaterhouse Cooper's Health Research Institute, wasteful spending accounts for $1.2 trillion of the $2.2 trillion spent on health care in the United States. The medical waste includes costs associated with inefficient insurance claims processing, defensive medicine, preventable hospital readmissions, medical errors, and unnecessary emergency room visits. [snip]
The way a doctor chooses to treat a patient may also contribute to waste. Variations in treatments waste the health system $10 billion annually, according to the report. When a hospital like Intermountain swaps out expensive procedures for cheaper, equally effective treatments it actually loses money. It can no longer charge for those pricier procedures.
"The old belief that better care is more care, turns out it's just not true," James says. "The big problem. It costs you money. Most of these savings go back to insurers or the government, those windfall savings. We're nearly always financially punished every time we save money."
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Like Ronald said, “Government is the problem”. The difficulty is convincing the populace.
Medicare costs at least 25% more than the accountants say due to these types of implicit tax shifts. medicaid probably 50%.
Only partially true. They are also making up for what they see as underpayment from insurance companies.
I had a kidney stone removed (it took two operations) and for the first operation that lasted 1.5 hours the total billed was almost $24,000. That works out to $1,000/hr. The aggregate billers only got about $18,000 but still the idea that it cost that much is ridiculous.
I don't think the doctor should have been paid for the first one since he didn't finish the job and I had to go back three weeks later and and they billed $15,000 for another .75 hour operation.
The "cost" of health care is obscene.
Sorry - that works out to $15,000/hr....
Basically the govt rips you off a couple different ways with Medicare ... first you pay taxes which don’t benefit you, but someone else; then it drives up the cost of your healthcare at work, so now you have to earn more, meaning you have to pay more taxes on the additional income; then you get less service when you do go to the doctor’s office or hospital because of the stupidity of forms you have to fill out, and that only the bare minimum of people will be hired due to them trying to keep costs down.
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