THIS IS NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART

Read It If You Dare

A few days ago,  Bruce Woych, a good friend of mine and frequent supplier of comments to this blog, alerted me to a famous special edition of Time magazine, published in March 2013. It contained a ground-shaking article by Steven Brill. More than 24,000 words long, it reports in scarifying detail why and how medical bills get so astronomically high. I found it difficult to read -- not because it's poorly written -- on the contrary, unlike the jargon contained in hospital bills, Brill's writing couldn't be more painfully clear and easy to follow. But for me, to learn how you and I are being ripped off, taken for chumps, nay, victimized, reduced to grovelling beggars by a coterie of !@#%*! -- I have no words that can be printed here. When I was reading it, I found myself getting more and more angry, clenching my fists and gritting my teeth, and muttering "Oh my God ... oh my God!" Truly, if you have high blood pressure, you may want to skip Brill's article.  But his summation, though chilling, can and should be read by everyone:

When you follow the money, you see the choices we've made, knowingly or unknowingly.

Over the past few decades, we've enriched the labs, drug companies, medical device makers, hospital administrators and purveyors of CT scans, MRIs, canes and wheelchairs. Meanwhile, we've squeezed the doctors who don't own their own clinics, don't work as drug or device consultants or don't otherwise game a system that is so gameable. And of course, we've squeezed everyone outside the system who gets stuck with the bills.

We've created a secure, prosperous island in an economy that is suffering under the weight of the riches those on the island extract.

And we've allowed those on the island and their lobbyists and allies to control the debate, diverting us from what Gerard Anderson, a health care economist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says is the obvious and only issue:

"All the prices are too damn high."

A few highlights should be noted:

• Every hospital has what is termed a Chargemaster, an internal price list for every service performed and every item supplied. But  "there seems to be no process, no rationale, behind the core document that is the basis for hundreds of billions of dollars in health care bills." What  results is a price ten or more times higher than the actual cost of the item. And these prices rise, automatically every year.
• But the Chargemaster prices, hospital officials insist, are just starting points for negotiations. And indeed, folks who are not on medicare and who are not on medicaid and who have decent insurance will have their insurance negotiate some of those prices down a bit. But those with no insurance or poor insurance are forced to pay the full chargemaster prices. Thus the economically vulnerable are penalized for their poverty.
• Hospitals routinely do double -- sometimes triple -- dipping, Brill quotes a Billing Advocate:, "First they charge more than $2,000 a day for the ICU, because it's an ICU and it has all this special equipment and personnel ...  "then they charge $1,000 for some kit used in the ICU to give someone a transfusion or oxygen ... And then they charge $50 or $100 for each tool or bandage or whatever that there is in the kit. That's triple billing."
• Brill writes: "According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the pharmaceutical and health-care-product industries, combined with organizations representing doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, health services and HMOs, have spent $5.36 billion since 1998 on lobbying in Washington. That dwarfs the $1.53 billion spent by the defense and aerospace industries and the $1.3 billion spent by oil and gas interests over the same period. That's right: the health-care-industrial complex spends more than three times what the military-industrial complex spends in Washington."

If you have the stomach for more, I salute you, and ask you to check out this link:

Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us.

Now you know. But it'snot enough simply to know:  For your knowledge to do any good YOU MUST SPREAD THE WORD!  As I never tire of saying,  when I meet somebody new, there's a more than 50% chance they'll not have heard of the New York Health Act (NYHA). Next time I meet them, there's a zero percent chance they won't know.  But I'm only one person.  Please help!  If you would like to know how you can spread the word, or have an idea about it, please email me at  indivisible12401@gmail.com and let me know.  Thanks!

Dio

PS: If you would like to leave a comment (and I hope  you will), simply click on the number of comments area, and share your thoughts in the "comment box" that appears.  Thanks!