Cost me $8 in parking a $2 in Tim Hortons coffee.
I felt an immense level of pride in the taxes I pay (43% income tax before deductions) when it clicked that anyone who walked in would have gotten this same service.
It reminds me warmly of 6am hockey practices when I was a kid.
1. Malpractice insurance
2. The overhead incurred by insurance companies and
3. The cost of serving uninsured patients who can't pay out of pocket.
The third one is huge. US emergency rooms by law must treat serious conditions -- but only serious conditions -- whether the patient can pay or not (for some value of "serious" -- I'm not sure of the details, but that don't really matter here). So there's a substantial population that can't get preventive treatment and so have no choice but to let minor conditions go untreated until they become serious (and, of course, much more expensive to deal with).
What's a fair rate for a cut that just needs skin glue and some antibiotics? $500? or is it more like $2600? Because it sounds like he's paying somewhere around a 5x multiplier just because 1) he got a cut and 2) he can pay it.
At some point that won't be sustainable, and emergency rooms will shut down from the cost. People will just stop going to emergency rooms if it means getting a bill for 5x for what it should cost.
No one actually pays the sticker price anyway, that's an artifact of the strange ways that medical billing works. People that pay in cash (rather than insurance) are given large discounts.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HJBD2LL/A/ablenet-plate-s...
Also, Apple doesn't have to factor in the cost of malpractice insurance.
Single payer is certainly one possible solution, but it's not the only feasible solution, despite conclusions that availability bias might lead us to.
I'm curious: what was the final price after insurance negotiated on your behalf?
Compare that to a state bargaining on behalf of 10+ million customers.
I think we need to fix several more issues before single payer would be a suitable option.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/prestoncooper2/2017/02/22/how-u... [2] http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/electricrates/ [3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-column-miller-medicare/re...
> but the plan bypasses an obvious remedy - one that President Donald Trump embraced as a candidate: allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies.
To me (non-english native speaker) it reads as if though they are literally not allowed to negotiate.
When it comes to schools, here (Sweden) the government negotiates how much money the schools get per student, not just the interest rates of loans. Lowering interest rates means students can afford a higher loan. None of this is comparable to negotiating costs.
Of course it can. For examples, please see: Medicare, Veterans Affairs, etc.
It's not single payer that makes our system better. It's competition and reasonable regulation that makes it possible to have cheap services available.
I honestly don't know, but I think part of the problem is a lack of price transparency. People cannot shop for the best prices for non-urgent procedures, etc. I bet price transparency would at least help stabilize the prices across providers. Is that enough to solve the problem completely? Doubtful, but it would be a start.
Although, in a way it does kind of make sense. Unlike consumer goods (television, cars, etc.), one's health is something they're likely willing to break-the-bank for. So without any kind of restraint, I could see costs getting out of control. The hospital is focused on making as much money as they can, and the consumer is focused on preserving their health. If one doesn't have their health after all, what do they have?
Add an ever increasing demand (baby boomers are aging rapidly) and suddenly, things begin to look much worse for the demand side of the equation.
There aren't that many countries that pay as much as the us from public funds (two, see my previous link) or out of pocket (none).
The problem is localized to the US.
More expensive healthcare per capita is what I'd expect given those attributes and "single payer is the only solution" does not seem to be logically linked to the problem and facts.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_body_mass...
I had something similar (knife slip, a few stitches) come out to like $350 at urgent care. I paid with (literal) cash.
If consumers had as much political strength on capitol hill as the medical industry, another system could be worked out. But they don't. The window was closed on that option with Citizens United.
Next time wash it out, bandage it up and wait for cheaper treatment if you still need it.
The would was small, maybe 1 centimeter, but deep enough that it wouldn't stop bleeding on its own. My girlfriend insisted we go to the ER (urgent cares around here are closed on Sundays), so we did.
I was the only one there that day. I was ushered in to see a doctor. The doctor looked at the wound, and said, "this is way too small for stiches, let's just use glue." So the ER nurse handed him a skin glue, and he used it to close the wound. After a few minutes, the wound was closed. I was prescribed antibiotics (kitchen knife, in case it had salmonella etc.) and sent my way.
Three months later, the bill arrived: $2,600.
That isn't a typo. Two thousand six hundred god damn dollars for skin glue on a small cut on the finger.
My insurance successfully negotiated it down, but still, the audacity of charging four figures for five minutes of medical care is just absolutely insane.
We desperately need single-payer healthcare in this country.