Why is health care so damn expensive?
We've been told various theories in answer to that question, such as doctors get paid per transactions they perform on patients, and not for the ultimate outcome of the particular ailment or injury.
Journalist Steven Brill was curious about why so much has been written about the price of health care in the US, but not about why it's so high. Hence Brill's more than 24,000 word report published in Time magazine last month, titled "A bitter pill," which examined the very question.
By analyzing several patients' hospital bills, line by line, he discovered "aggressive markups" that are staggering when compared to what a patient on Medicare gets billed. A Medicare patient who gets a simple chest X-ray, for example, is charged $20.44; a patient not insured is charged $283.
The maximum prices for every possible charge in a hospital are contained in a "chargemaster."
On Monday, CL asked Tampa General Hospital's new CEO Jim Burkhart: Why do hospitals have such an outrageous set of prices? Burkhart replied, "You mean why does a hospital charge $10 for an aspirin?"
This article appears in Mar 7-13, 2013.