Hospital Charges Are Outrageous

Select MonthSeptember 2012August 2012July 2012June 2012May 2012April 2012March 2012February 2012January 2012December 2011November 2011October 2011September 2011August 2011July 2011June 2011May 2011April 2011March 2011February 2011January 2011December 2010November 2010October 2010September 2010August 2010July 2010June 2010May 2010April 2010March 2010February 2010January 2010December 2009	$83,046 For A 3 Hour Hospital Visit - Why Are Hospital Bills So Outrageous? The fastest way to go broke in America is to go to the hospital.  These days it seems like almost everyone has an outrageous hospital bill story to share.  It is getting to the point where most people are deathly afraid to go to the hospital.  All the financial progress that you have made in recent years can literally be wiped out in just a matter of hours.  For example, you are about to read about an Arizona woman that was recently charged $83,046 for a 3 hour hospital visit.  How in the world is anyone supposed to pay a bill like that?  I have a really hard time understanding why a visit to the doctor should ever be more than a couple hundred bucks or why a hospital stay should ever be more than a couple thousand dollars.  Outrageous hospital bills are a real pet peeve of mine and I have not even been to the hospital in ages.  What makes all of this even more infuriating is that Medicare, Medicaid and the big insurance companies are often charged less than 10 percent of what the rest of us are billed for the same procedures.  There is a reason why 41 percent of all working age Americans are struggling with medical debt right now.  It is because our health care system has become a giant money making scam.  Millions of desperate Americans go into hospitals each year assuming that they will be treated fairly, but in the end they get stuck with incredibly outrageous bills and in many cases cruel debt collection techniques are employed against them if they don't pay. So why do we have to pay so much for medical care?  Back in 1980, less than 10 percent of U.S. GDP went to health care.  Today, about 18 percent of U.S. GDP goes toward health care. And considering the fact that over the next 20 years the number of Americans 65 years of age or older is projected to double that number is going to go even higher. On a per capita basis we spend about twice as much on health care as anyone else in the world. Health Care 6th Largest Economy In fact, if the U.S. health care system was a nation it would be the 6th largest economy on the entire planet. America spent 2.47 trillion dollars on health care in 2009, and it is now being projected that we will spend 4.5 trillion dollars on health care in 2019. Our system is completely and totally broken, and Obamacare is going to make things far worse.  We need to throw the entire system out and start over. A perfect example of why this is true is what happened when 52-year-old Marcie Edmonds went in to a hospital in Arizona recently to get treated for a scorpion sting.... With the help of a friend, she called Poison Control and was advised to go to the nearest hospital that had scorpion antivenom, Chandler Regional Medical Center. At the hospital, an emergency room doctor told her about the antivenom, called Anascorp, that could quickly relieve her symptoms. Edmonds said the physician never talked with her about the cost of the drug or treatment alternatives. Her symptoms subsided after she received two doses of the drug Anascorp through an IV, and she was discharged from the hospital in about three hours. Weeks later, she received a bill for $83,046 from Chandler Regional Medical Center. The hospital, owned by Dignity Health, charged her $39,652 per dose of Anascorp. What makes this even more shocking is that hospitals in Mexico only charge $100 per dose of Anascorp. Hospitals Charge Whatever They Can Get Away With These days many hospitals will do whatever they can get away with on hospital bills. One NBC News reporter was absolutely stunned at the bill that she received after she went in for neck surgery for degenerative disc disease recently.... Once I got my itemized bill, the grand total was a little over $66,013.40!   That was for a one night stay and a four level vertebrae fusion surgery.  The charges included $22 for one sleeping pill, $427 for one dissecting tool, and $32,000 for four titanium plates and ten screws. I brought it to Todd Hill, a fee based patient advocate who helps people decipher their medical bills. "The screws in your procedure were billed at $605 a piece for a total of $6050 dollars. We've seen those in our past research for $25 or $30," he said. "In this case, the markup is tremendous," he added. Considering the fact that 77 percent of American families are living paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time, a single hospital bill like this can be a financial death blow. Charged $11,000 for indigestion If you have time, read this tragic story where one man was charged $11,000 and all he had was a case of bad indigestion.  Nothing was even wrong with him and now his family is going to have to declare bankruptcy. Often medical bills are so complex and so confusing that nobody can really understand them.  A lot of the times this is probably done on purpose to keep people from understanding how badly they are being overcharged.  The following is from a recent article in the New York Times.... Hospital care tends to be the most confounding, and experts say the charges you see on your bill are usually completely unrelated to the cost of providing the services (at hospitals, these list prices are called the “charge master file”). “The charges have no rhyme or reason at all,” Gerard Anderson, director of the Center for Hospital Finance and Management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Why is 30 minutes in the operating room $2,000 and not $1,500? There is absolutely no basis for setting that charge. It is not based upon the cost, and it’s not based upon the market forces, other than the whim of the C.F.O. of the hospital.” And those charges don’t really have any connection to what a hospital or medical provider will accept for payment, either. “If you line up five patients in their beds and they all have gall bladders removed and they get the same exact medication and services, if they have insurance or if they don’t have insurance, the hospital will get five different reimbursements, and none of it is based on cost,” said Holly Wallack, a medical billing advocate in Miami Beach. “The insurers negotiate a different rate, and if you are uninsured, underinsured or out of network, you are asked to pay full fare.” It has been estimated that hospitals in the United States overcharge their patients by about 10 billion dollars every single year. Medical Bills #1 Reason For Bankruptcy Medical bills are the number one reason why Americans file for bankruptcy.  As I mentioned earlier, approximately 41 percent of all working age Americans are struggling with medical debt. And health insurance is not as much protection as you might think.  According to a report published in the American Journal of Medicine, of all bankruptcies caused by medical debt, approximately 75 percent of the time the people actually did have health insurance. And if you can't pay your bills, many hospitals will come after you ruthlessly. In fact, collection agencies sought to collect unpaid medical bills from approximately 30 million Americans during 2010 alone. If you don't cough up the cash they are demanding you can even end up in prison.  The following example comes from CBS News.... How did breast cancer survivor Lisa Lindsay end up behind bars? She didn't pay a medical bill -- one the Herrin, Ill., teaching assistant was told she didn't owe. "She got a $280 medical bill in error and was told she didn't have to pay it," The Associated Press reports. "But the bill was turned over to a collection agency, and eventually state troopers showed up at her home and took her to jail in handcuffs." Although the U.S. abolished debtors' prisons in the 1830s, more than a third of U.S. states allow the police to haul people in who don't pay all manner of debts, from bills for health care services to credit card and auto loans. Why Are Bills So High? But why do these bills have to be so high?  It is not like many doctors are getting rich these days.  In fact, many of them are going broke. So what is the deal? Well, as a recent article by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts explained, there are a whole lot of people pulling profit out of the system other than just doctors these days.... There are two main reasons that US medicine is so expensive. One is that profits are piled upon profits. 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. An article posted on medicalcostadvocate.com has some outrageous examples of the difference between what you and I are billed and what Medicare pays out for the exact same procedures.... A patient in Illinois was charged $12,712 for cataract surgery. Medicare pays $675 for the same procedure. In California, a patient was charged $20,120 for a knee operation for which Medicare pays $584. And a New Jersey patient was charged $72,000 for a spinal fusion procedure that Medicare covers for $1,629. So not only do we pay very high taxes to support Medicaid and Medicare, we also have to pay higher medical bills in order to make up the difference for the money that doctors and hospitals are not seeing from those patients. Unfortunately, Medicaid and Medicare are expected to grow dramatically in the years ahead. For example, it is now being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to Medicaid. And enrollment in Medicare is projected to grow from 50.7 million today to 73.2 million in 2025. How in the world can our current system possibly handle this? And please don't tell me that Obamacare is the answer. The truth is that Obamacare is going to take everything that is wrong with our health care system and make it even worse. We are heading into the greatest health care crisis the United States has ever seen, and none of our leaders seem to have any answers. I am just absolutely disgusted with the condition of our health care system.  It is dominated by government bureaucrats, pharmaceutical corporations and the big health insurance companies.  It is a giant money making scam that seeks to drain as much money from the rest of us as possible.

Less Doctoring, Not More

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American Healthcare: What Business Are Ye In? by Bill Sardi Edited by Dr. Don Selvidge A couple of PhD analysts write about what’s wrong with American healthcare in a recent edition of The New England Journal of Medicine. Their report, entitled "What Business Are We In?" They analogously lead off their article by pointing to the Eastman Kodak Company that saw itself in the film business rather than the imaging business and after 131 years in business, filed for bankruptcy in January of 2012. So they write: "The analogous situation in health care is that whereas doctors and hospitals focus on producing health care, what people really want is health. Health care is just a means to that end – and an increasingly expensive one. If we could get better health some other way, just as we can now produce images without film….., then maybe we wouldn't have to rely so much on health care." The American People Fallen Sucker to Sales Pitch But do we really see the end of doctoring? The American people have fallen sucker for the sales pitch, that America has the best healthcare in the world, and they want more of it, regardless of whether it works or not. Many Americans feel they paid into a system (Medicare) and they want what they paid for. They want the miracle drugs, the CAT-scans, the robotic surgery, all of it, as long as it doesn’t have to be paid out of their own pocket. They can’t imagine that that healthcare system cannot possibly deliver on its promises to provide more and more high-technology medicine to a growing population of aging Americans. There will be a default, call it rationing, but from a different quarter, as I will explain momentarily. Modern medicine is the problem, not the solution.  Modern medicine is not going to take money out of its own hands. The solutions are going to come from an entirely different quarter. Neither did Kodak see the handwriting on the wall. The only way to reform medicine and bring down its obscene costs is to create alternatives, just like Kodak succumbed to digital cameras. Income predicts health. People with extra dollars can purchase better quality food, vitamins, and tend to be more literate and therefore savvy about producing health at home. The irony here is that the people who can least afford modern medicine tend to be its best customers, while wealthier and better educated tend to seek alternative treatments (think of Steve Jobs in his battle with pancreatic cancer). Retirees take more and more problematic and ineffective medicines without recognizing these pharmacological elixirs are causing more problems than their diseases. But contrast this with the recent revelation that 46% of American retirees solely rely on a Social Security check. Over-priced American healthcare stole their pay raises and left them penniless in their retirement!  There is no freedom to choose. Most retirees have to take what Medicare pays for, and it certainly doesn’t pay for vitamin supplements or healthy food.   Greater advances in health status will come from improving the American food chain than in any doctoring. There may be no way out of this mess short of altering the food chain, eliminating cheap sugars (high fructose corn syrup), taste enhancers (MSG), hormonized meat, hydrogenated fats, iron-fortified breakfast cereals, and cheap food that is centered on carbohydrates (pasta, rice, bread, beans). But don’t bet on Kraft or Archer Daniels Midland leading the way either. All the promotion of healthy foods is completely undone by TV advertising for snack foods. Pringles are not going to disappear. Liberated American women are not given to the inconvenience of breast feeding. While an estimated 74% start out with good intentions, only 33% of moms exclusively breast feed at three months of age and only 14% exclusively breast feed at six months. The selection of an alternative to breast milk may doom a child’s future health. A recent study reveals that cow’s milk infant formulas provide an excessive amount of leucine, an amino acid that genetically re-programs a child towards obesity. Cow’s milk is intended to build a newborn calf into a 1000-pound cow. How will modern medicine respond to this sad discovery? Will pediatricians warn mothers away from cow’s milk formulas? Don’t bet on it. Modern medicine will revel in the fact there is more disease to treat and collect more insurance money. Less doctoring, not more. If you want to remain healthy you need to learn how to skirt around the present healthcare system. To conclude, modern medicine is not going to recommend anything where it is shoved out of the picture. But that is exactly what needs to be done. Humans can be re-programmed to be healthy by their foods and dietary supplements, not doctor-prescribed drugs. Will this happen? The Western disease-promoting diet can be changed. September 3, 2012 Bill Sardi [send him mail] is a frequent writer on health and political topics. His health writings can be found at www.naturalhealthlibrarian.com. His latest book is Downsizing Your Body. Copyright © 2012 Bill Sardi Word of Knowledge Agency, San Dimas, California. This article has been written exclusively for www.LewRockwell.com and other parties who wish to refer to it should link rather than post at other URLs.  The Best of Bill Sardi

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