Posted on 01/06/2015 4:25:18 PM PST by Theoria
While reporting on the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, journalist Steven Brill was diagnosed with a life-threatening condition that required heart surgery.
"There I was: a reporter who had made hospital presidents and hospital executives and health care executives and insurance executives sweat because I asked them all kinds of questions about their salaries and about their profit margins," Brill tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "And now I was lying on a gurney in a hospital in real fear of my life."
Brill had a bubble on his heart that the doctors said had a 15 to 17 percent chance of bursting each year, he says. If it did, he would die. The experience, Brill says, helped him analyze health care from a patient's perspective.
"At that moment I wasn't worried about costs; I wasn't worried about a cost benefit analysis of this drug or this medical device; I wasn't worried about health care policy," Brill says. "It drove home to me the reality that in addition to being a tough political issue because of all the money involved, health care is a toxic political issue because of all the fear and the emotion involved."
Brill's surgery happened not long after he had written a special report for Time magazine investigating the inflated charges in hospital bills. The article Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us won a National Magazine Award. After winning the award, Brill ended up with pages and pages of his own inflated and confusing hospital charges.
"A patient in the American health care system has very little leverage, has very little knowledge, has very little power," Brill says.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
His previous big article on FR:
Bitter Pill: The Exorbitant Prices of Health Care
Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us
Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us
MP3 of interview.
FYI, It was never suppose to work. This is just step one to the finalizing of a “SINGLE PAYER” plan that they had in mind all along. Yet, we have these “REPUBLICAN” politicians that knew all along, that it wasn’t suppose to work, and they continue their charade, in letting us believe that they are against it.
End it, don’t mend it!
I tuned out right after I got to the “it’s not like some people walk into an ER wanting something for free” part. He’s clearly clueless.
Put a “$50 deposit required from all patients” sign out in front of the ER, and install a Free Clinic next door. See which one the line forms at.
American Enterprise Institute for the Pubbies and Harvard for the 'Rats shook hands on the backroom deal months before Obama's immaculation (as Rush calls it).
Done deal. We were all screwed from the get, by guys who came to school four hours early and did tomorrow's homework while were still eating breakfast (it's called Charley Hustle, screw you, t. s. crybabies, I'm going to Harvard and you ain't).
This deal was so precooked.
and because they have insider info on the stock mkt many in congress are making bank on the obozocare. As well it is meant to ration care to kill off those who are disabled and or retired and no longer paying into the government coffers but instead are taking some of their money back out of the system. That's a burden because the government needs that money to support the massive influx of illegals they are letting in who have no loyalty to our constitution or the country.
There, fixed it for you!
“I tuned out right after I got to the “it’s not like some people walk into an ER wanting something for free” part. He’s clearly clueless.”
Has this person lived in the US during the last 40 years?
Do they have even a vague idea as to how the “system” works?
Yep, and those that were on the fence were bought out. Need I remind every one, that our CHIEF JUSTICE on the SUPREME COURT, was the snake in the grass that made all of this possible? And he is in there for life. If I remember, historically speaking, there was only one person on the Supreme Court, that was asked to step down. His name was Abe Fortas, during the LBJ administration. Because he was a PROVEN thief.
What American medicine needs is a transparent price mechanism. What it has is state and regional oligopolies and monopolies.
Let the market work by ended all practices that create monopolies and interfere in interstate commerce. The market literally is a transparent price mechanism. Competition works, don’t conservatives still believe in it?
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