In other news, War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength!
My 2 year old daughter got a 1/2 inch deep cut on her forehead. Cost - $400. Treatment - Doctor applied superglue.
My 2 year old daughter later got a 1/2 inch deep cut on her cheek. Cost - $0. Treatment - I applied superglue.
California Pacific Medical Center is part of Sutter Health, a not-for-profit healthcare system. Their CEO, Pat Fry, was paid $4 million in salary and bonuses last year. The money for that has to come from somewhere.
Yup , stitches in the hand this summer.About 3 grand.Hospital charges the dr for the use of the room,nurse and tetanus shot.The Dr. that works for a sub contacting firm charges for the hand clean up and stitches done by a student who isn’t being paid she is in training,never saw a DR.
Its called double billing and total BS.
California asked for this. They asked for it because they freely allow non paying illegals into the state, they allow most any deadbeat unfettered emergency access to healthcare facilities, they encourage torts and mal practice suits, over regulate the medical industry and then proceed to tax, license, fee free enterprise to death.
I have no sympathy. Go sew those cuts up yourselves if you don’t like it.
Get the government out of the medical system and prices will drop up to 86%.
We’ve destroyed any choice or natural cost-saving or free-market incentive in health care
Now all the sheep should begin bleating “SINGLE PAYER” right on cue
The main reason for high hospital costs in the United States, economists say, is fiscal, not medical: Hospitals are the most powerful players in a health care system that has little or no price regulation in the private market. …Price regulation is going to bring down costs? There is no regulatory environment with a bloated FDA and HHS breathing down your neck? Really?
Chelsea Manning, 22, a student, received bills for close to $3,000 for six stitches after she tripped running up a path. Insurers and patients negotiated lower prices, but those charges were a starting point. …This is not the “former” Bradley Manning, for the record.
Medicaid has to be paid for. As usual, it comes out of our pockets.
By removing the person footing the bills even further away from the person providing the service?
It seems as though the effort to make health care “affordable” should have been applied to the front end of the rope - - the source of inflated health care costs. Instead, dear leader applied the effort (ha) to the opposite end, i.e. the cost of insurance to pay for the inflated cost of health care services. So it will be a never-ending cycle, the costs on both ends will continue to rise (did the ACA mention anything about increased premiums?). They think it’s expensive now, give it a couple of years - unless a miracle happens.
Look on the bright side, a stitch in time saves nine. So we saved $4,500.
1984
…and health care is now affordable all because of the Affordable Care Act generously bestowed upon us by our munificent Democrat leaders in Congress.
I’ve always said that the first line of defense in actually curtailing hospital costs is forcing hospitals to not only publish their price lists, but actually give them to patients and their families while in the hospital.
The excuses given usually are ‘why do you want to traumatize the family at such a time?’ My response is, ‘why do you want to traumatize the family by charging $120 for a bottle of Tylenol which you administer exactly one pill from?’
Alas, initially, it will harm the health of the average citizen as they suffer from heart attacks seeing exactly how much they’re paying.
The free market hasn’t applied to “healthcare” for a long time.
Note the folks getting the stitches didn’t know the cost until they got the bill much later. Most things, you know the price BEFORE you buy.
Maybe if they knew how much it’d be, they’d gone somewhere else, or done it themselves.
People today don’t even know what “insurance” is. The expectation for “medical insurance” is NOT insurance (which would be what you pay to cut your loss on a risk you don’t want realized - as in insuring mail or your car). It’s expected to be a coupon discount on expenses you know you will incur (not risk, but a guarantee of “loss”), i.e., simply a third party payer.
In addition to wages and salaries for doctors, nurses, and medical personnel, the American health care system has to provide profits for private hospitals, diagnostic centers, insurance companies, and for the accountants, attorneys and management consultants made necessary by the enormous litigation and regulatory compliance cost. American medicine is the most regulated in the world and the most criminalized.
And another big factor is that the rest of us have to make up the difference for the patients that are not profitable.
It has gotten to the point where some doctors in certain kinds of practices barely make any profit on Medicare and Medicaid patients. In fact, in many cases doctors actually lose money treating them.
The cost isn’t in the stiches. It’s in the training, infrastructure, government BS, insurance company BS, etc. that physicians have to put up with. Additional government regulation can only increase the price. I’ve read that when you buy a car, 1/4 to 1/3 of the cost in government regulation, 1/4 in union pension and the rest is divided between variable cost and profit.
This is how ‘free’ care has been delivered to American’s poor - hospital emergency rooms... at top dollar. No one’s done without medical care... and the old bargain included nice fat tax write offs for the Hospital taking ‘Jesus cases’...
I can assure you - that system- which was stupid and expensive - will be a million times better than the horror ObamaCare will become.
I asked him where the money was going to come for that, and he told me it was going to come from the 3% tax on health insurance premiums. I told him I didn't think the numbers added up. He just shrugged his shoulders.
Hospitals signed onto this with dollar signs in their eyes. Oddly, they can't see that they will be the next lambs brought to the slaughter.
“Bombs away - The White House has laid out its preliminary plans for a potential bailout of the insurance industry. The regulatory filing, flagged by NYT’s Robert Pear, blames the bailout on President Obama’s sudden reversal of his long-planned regulations forcing insurers to cancel millions of policies. Obama nixed his rules after a public backlash over his misleading promise to voters in 2012 about keeping their insurance policies and doctors. But the bailout, allowed under a little-known provision of the law, may also be in answer to industry outrage over the technical and administrative failures of the president and his team. With huge sticker shock awaiting holders of cancelled policies, many may opt out even after they make it through the crash-prone Web site. Any relief to insurance companies would come on top of $1 trillion in subsidies they are slated to receive over the next ten years.”
[Ready on the right - Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., saw this one coming. He has a bill on offer in the Senate closing the door on insurance bailouts.]