– I wrote, with some passion, the other day about universal health care – and why it won’t be coming to the U.S.
– Here’s another piece by Kevin Drum of Mother Jones that speaks succinctly to this point.
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Karen Tumulty writes in Time this week about her brother, Pat, who was diagnosed with kidney failure and then learned that the private insurance he’d been paying for for years wouldn’t cover him. That’s bad enough, but then there’s this:
A paradox of medical costs is that people who can least afford them — the uninsured — end up being charged the most. Insurance companies, with large numbers of customers, have the financial muscle to negotiate low rates from health-care providers; individuals do not. Whereas insured patients would have been charged about $900 by the hospital that performed Pat’s biopsy (and pay only a small fraction of that out of their own pocket), Pat’s bill was $7,756. For lab work — and there was a lot of it — he was being charged as much as six times the price an insurance company would pay.
More…➡
Tags: Healthcare, US Medical System