Posted on 05/07/2008 7:32:24 AM PDT by Danny Carlton
Digging through some old papers a few years ago, my mother-in-law came across the hospital bill for when her second son was born in 1958. They had no insurance. Few did in those days, and the bill totaled $75. That included a week's stay in the hospital.
In 1993 we were expecting our second child, and also had no insurance. We managed to save up some money and contacted the hospital regarding paying the bill ourselves. They said prepaying meant we could spend only $2,000, only if there were no complications and it included only 3 days in the hospital. But this was the hospital, and the doctors, both the OBGYN and the Pediatrician. The whole shebang.
Last year I had my gall bladder removed. Because my liver was also affected I had to stay in the hospital a week. The hospital billed our insurance company over $25,000 dollars, of which the insurance company paid $10,000. The hospital then billed us a bit over $1,100 and wrote the rest off. Then followed an army of specialists, anesthesiologists, and other varied and assorted -istseach also billing both the insurance company and us. I was actually expecting to get a bill from the janitor, but that never came (Maybe they need to change their title to "Janitorists").
What in the world happened between 1958 and 2007?!?
(Excerpt) Read more at jacklewis.net ...
Watch this to see. Too many people accessing services without paying.
In 1993, $75.00 from 1958 is worth:
$374.74 using the Consumer Price Index
$323.19 using the GDP deflator
$443.27 using the value of consumer bundle
$443.11 using the unskilled wage
$715.00 using the nominal GDP per capita
$1,068.72 using the relative share of GDP
That’s compared to the $2000 1993 delivery cost, which was the only apples to apples comparison available. That still indicates a 5-fold increase in the cost of care. You’d expect some of this because of the increased quality in the form of more/better equipment on hand.
You’d also expect more, because of the drastically increased amount of regulation that health care is under, but the value of that increased regulation is very doubtful. It’s to the point that the regulatory burden impairs the delivery of care. And if it’ doubles to quintuples the cost of care, it’s also limiting access to care.
Instead of hospitals absorbing the cost of people who can't pay. I think government should foot the bill. It would reassign the cost of non-payers from other patients to all taxpayers. Then it would have more visibility and gov't might be motivated to address fraud, abuse and misuse of resources like emergency rooms.
It was also before they invented the machine that goes “Ping!”
LOL, Yeah, and you got to pay for that!!
Your links aren’t working. I’m interested in reading the rest so please ping me if you get it fixed. Thanks.
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