Here I add a link to a time magazine article 11 pages long about healthcare that was published this week and I hope you guys read it. Once you are finished reading it, you'll feel outraged. Here's an appetizer:
regarding a medical bill>
The first of the 344 lines printed out across eight pages of his hospital bill — filled with indecipherable numerical codes and acronyms — seemed innocuous. But it set the tone for all that followed. It read, “1 ACETAMINOPHE TABS 325 MG.” The charge was only $1.50, but it was for a generic version of a Tylenol pill. You can buy 100 of them on Amazon for $1.49 even without a hospital’s purchasing power.
According to one of a series of exhaustive studies done by the McKinsey & Co. consulting firm, we spend more on health care than the next 10 biggest spenders combined: Japan, Germany, France, China, the U.K., Italy, Canada, Brazil, Spain and Australia. We may be shocked at the $60 billion price tag for cleaning up after Hurricane Sandy. We spent almost that much last week on health care. We spend more every year on artificial knees and hips than what Hollywood collects at the box office. We spend two or three times that much on durable medical devices like canes and wheelchairs, in part because a heavily lobbied Congress forces Medicare to pay 25% to 75% more for this equipment than it would cost at Walmart.
The expensive technology deployed on Janice S. was a bigger factor in her bill than the lab tests. An “NM MYO REST/SPEC EJCT MOT MUL” was billed at $7,997.54. That’s a stress test using a radioactive dye that is tracked by an X-ray computed tomography, or CT, scan. Medicare would have paid Stamford $554 for that test.
Patient was charged $18 each for Accu-chek diabetes test strips. Amazon sells boxes of 50 for about $27, or 55¢ each
$21,000 Heartburn Bill
in the end, it seems obamacare was mostly a waste of time. People keep going broke while the hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies continue with their orgies.
http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/
