[quote]jj-dude wrote:
[quote]H factor wrote:
The big issue in comparing coffee to health care is the insane costs though Nick. A kid in my fiances class from about 6 years has been battling cancer for about ten months. His insurance has not covered everything, it has covered some things. Right now he is starting to take a new drug that is not covered by his insurance. The cost of the pills alone (nothing else) for him is 180 dollars a day. Luckily I don’t think he has to take them for a super long amount of time.
The costs of JUST those pills for him if he had to take them for a year is over 65,000 dollars. No doctors appointments. No chemo (he’s been through three rounds). Nothing else. 65,000 dollars a year.
Health care is a bitch because we are talking about people’s lives. It’s way easier to deny yourself coffee if coffee prices are high. Denying your loved ones life saving treatments because of the costs just doesn’t happen.
I don’t disagree with your post, but I think comparing health care and coffee is a gigantic stretch my man.
Nothing can speak cheaper healthcare into existence though, you’re absolutely right. [/quote]
Just a little anecdote to put this in perspective. I had to get a massive rotator cuff repair last August. The cost? So far it has topped $90k. Um, sort of. Here is where it gets murky.
The important point in what I am going to say next is that all of you I think miss what the economics of health care are. I am not the customer for the hospital, my insurance company is. So, the hospital billed them an astronomical sum which then by a set of byzantine bureaucratic agreements was reduced by a factor of about 20 – so the actual cost of the surgery was about $4,500 of which I had to pay around $500 out of pocket. $4,000 isn’t too shabby. The point is that there was/is a tremendous amount of finagling that goes on between hospitals and insurance. I got breathless statements from the insurance company showing what the hospital charged followed by eye-popping discounts. Um. Yeah. Right. Whatever. My reading is that the hospitals completely over charge so they can bargain. Since there is no free market in healthcare, it turns into backroom horse trading…
Another case study was that I had some other surgery done last year. My insurance wouldn’t cover it because it was out of band. My doctor charged me 1/3 of his normal cost if I paid it and he explained it was because it was far cheaper to get the money from an individual than try and get it from insurance (i.e. he doesn’t have to pay staff to hassle with the insurance company). I read later an article that found that many doctors will charge like this rather than deal with insurance. Again, the insurance companies are the customers of healthcare, not the patients.
Just saying that the so-called economics that prompted the ACA are not what I have observed in the field. There is something else at work here. Any other stories people have to share?
As always, I’m probably just full of shit…
– jj[/quote]
JJ: If you haven’t read the work of Steven Brill you’re missing out. Read Bitter Pill. Quite eye opening (I know some have attacked parts, but on the whole it is extremely strong). Essentially hospitals don’t “know” what most things cost and you’re right about the bargains between hospitals, insurers, and the gov’t when they step in.
Health care doesn’t resemble a free market and hasn’t in quite some time. For one thing consumers (us) don’t or can’t shop around like we can in other markets.
If we could cut out the middle man some prices would be lower. I don’t think insurance is going anywhere and I don’t think government is going anywhere either in regards to health care.
Hospitals for the most part have no fucking clue why they charge what they do. They will also inflate certain costs like you said (see massive charges for aspirin, gauze, etc when you can buy it off amazon for thousands of percent less) in order to have bargaining power with government/insurance.
