One Reason U.S. Healthcare is Currently So Screwed Up
 

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Notice the guy on the left went to Belgium to get his hip replacement done, not a developing nation like Thailand.



Great article in the NYT about the whole thing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/he...nted=all&_r=1&

:Shifty:

still trying to see the correlation between a hip replacement charge and a knee replacement charge?



maybe i should actually read the article



meh



dont care enough to

It's expensive because nobody sees the cost come out of their pocket directly, so nobody cares the prices are high.

It's expensive because the US healthcare system is full of "middle men". Every one take their cut.

Only 1/3 true. While adding to the cost, the biggest issue is our government itself. If EVERYONE was forced to pay the same amount for a specific procedure, the cost would drop considerably. The issue here, as I have stated in the past many times, government run heath-organizations can pay what ever they deem "reasonable" for a service. They can do this because they have the healthcare providers by the proverbial balls; either accept to programs payment, or loose a large percentage of customers and eventually go out of business. This means that if they offer to pay $1,000 for a $5,000 procedure, the company has to make back that 4k plus accrued overhead (added time, further accounting, etc) by charging the out-of-pocket customers and insurance companies. Imagine if you will, how quickly that extra $1,000 will add back up too! And for anyone who's dealt with insurance knows, the are handed a price and then negotiate a settlement. So the price you and I see is inflated several fold just to make overhead on the insurance claims, since we (out of pocket and the insurance co.s) are handed the same number. If government programs and insurance were to pay what these service providers would be otherwise asking, the price on many of the exorbitant procedures today would drop to much more reasonable levels.



Unfortunately though, people would still b*tch,

Next time offer to pay cash and see how much lower the bill is.

The bill is consistently lower by ~25% for me, at routine visits. For more involved stuff, I've heard of discounts as much as 70% by coding the billing as self-pay vs. coding it as insurance.



And it would be even lower if everybody paid out of pocket



The title is "one reason" and i8acobra gave one. There are lots, and most of them have to do with lawyers and legislators.

There are a sh*tton of docs who don't accpet Medicare or Medicaid. Not only are they not out of business, they drive Ferrari's. Go ahead, ask my Nephrologist.

How does the car your doctor drives affect the cost of heathcare on a national level? If he's smart (and is sounds like that's the case) he'll shop the local markets, charge 20% less and pocket the profit. It's call capitalism. He COULD charge much less and hold that same market presence due to the fact he refuses medicare and medicaid, but with far lower profit. But given the circumstances, that would just be stupid. You pay and chose him. If you think he should drive a Honda civic and make 25k a year talk to him about it on a personal level and find a new doctor to fix the broken nose he'll no doubt give you.