One of our family friends recently had a racing heartbeat and spent one day in the hospital while they ran tests and tried to figure out if there was anything wrong. She does not have insurance. The hospital billed her $33,000. Something is very wrong with the healthcare system in the U.S. It should not cost $33,000 to run some basic tests and spend one day in the hospital. There are plenty of Americans who can barely afford housing, let alone a hospital visit! Americans cannot afford this, something needs to change. The situation needs to be assessed and we need to figure out why hospital care is costing so much. And it's not because healthcare workers are being paid too much, they're already bringing in nurses from the Philippines because they can't find enough skilled American nurses willing to work for the salaries they're offering. Where is all this money going?
It Is not going anywhere. Hospitals charge the uninsured about four to five times what the big insurance companies would pay for the same services. A large insurance company would pay about $7,000 for the same visit.
It's called price-gouging and it one of the reasons health plan coverage costs so much and one of the reasons why Americans pay more for healthcare than any other foreign State.
Cost shifting can only make economic sense to cover the fixed costs, when providing additional medical care to more patients does not cost all that much more than it would to provide care to fewer patients. Otherwise we would be seeing a lot more private for-profit hospitals refusing to accept Medicare or patients who cannot pay. Of course, it may be that the price structure is such in the hospital industry that it is difficult for hospitals to refuse providing their services in individual cases like a normal business. I mean hospitals may basically be forced to provide the service first and figure out the payment later, so this could be responsible for the cost shifting, as the hospital tries to figure out which patients can pay. I've read a little bit about these sort of effects in this thread: Effect of Immigration on Hospitals Basically, according to this idea, hospital prices would be determined by their customer base; the more customers who cannot pay full price, the more the price would be driven up for everyone else. Unlike most businesses, there may only be one hospital in the community, and patients generally do not drive very far to go to a hospital far away, so there may be an inherent lack of competition in this marketplace, i.e. it is very localized.
Its all part of the scam that is government run health care. Have your friends ask for an itemized bill (it will list every charge from a single aspirin to x-rays to the time spent in a hospital room), review it carefully, and question everything. The hospital will not be able to back up much of their expenses. Just reviewing the itemized list almost always drops the bill a tremendous amount, sometimes more than half.
Hospitals have charged: $55,000 for an appendectomy that really only costs about $2,800. The insurance company settled the claim for $11,000.......for an appendectomy that really only costs about $2,800. $117,000 in assistant surgeon fees for a 4 hour surgery, that really only costs about $3,600 $1.3 Million for a premature birth that really only costs $35,000. You can google those. They're all real charges levied by hospitals, in part because there is no competition between hospitals there are only monopoly cartels that dictate prices far above Market rates.
