Re:Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills
by AnthonyMouse on Monday December 21, 2020 @02:03PM
(#25498175)
> Cancer and other disease are extremely expensive to treat and fairly common in the population. Yet, somehow, emergency care which is a minority of health costs, eats up 10% of the spending.
Emergency care is not actually uncommon. Heart attacks, car accidents, these are the leading causes of death. It's completely reasonable to expect this to legitimately consume 10% of healthcare resources.
> Anyone that's been to an emergency room knows how excessive the price gouging going on there is. Pills that cost $0.10 OTC (or less!) routinely see 100x markup. That same pill can cost anywhere from $10->$15.
This is just opportunism, but it isn't really the core of the problem.
Emergency care is inherently expensive for a specific reason. You need an emergency heart surgeon on premises in case anybody needs heart surgery regardless of whether anybody does at any given time. You also need a neurosurgeon and one for every other specialty, and all the supporting equipment. It's very expensive, which is why it amounts to 10% of healthcare costs.
They then try to recover some of those costs by massively overcharging for ibuprofen and band-aids, which is silly (charge insurers the actual cost for emergency heart surgery instead), but it's not going to be a source of major net cost savings just to do the accounting differently.
Re:Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills
by unishark on Monday December 21, 2020 @02:44PM
(#25498627)
They also mark up everything to cover uninsured patients. Who by the way commonly use the ER for primary care and probably explain a lot of that 10 percent.
Emergency care is not actually uncommon. Heart attacks, car accidents, these are the leading causes of death. It's completely reasonable to expect this to legitimately consume 10% of healthcare resources.
> Anyone that's been to an emergency room knows how excessive the price gouging going on there is. Pills that cost $0.10 OTC (or less!) routinely see 100x markup. That same pill can cost anywhere from $10->$15.
This is just opportunism, but it isn't really the core of the problem.
Emergency care is inherently expensive for a specific reason. You need an emergency heart surgeon on premises in case anybody needs heart surgery regardless of whether anybody does at any given time. You also need a neurosurgeon and one for every other specialty, and all the supporting equipment. It's very expensive, which is why it amounts to 10% of healthcare costs.
They then try to recover some of those costs by massively overcharging for ibuprofen and band-aids, which is silly (charge insurers the actual cost for emergency heart surgery instead), but it's not going to be a source of major net cost savings just to do the accounting differently.