"One night last summer at her home near Stamford, Conn., a 64-year-old sales clerk whom I'll call Janice S. felt chest pains. She was taken four miles by ambulance to the emergency room at Stamford Hospital, a nonprofit institution. After about three hours of tests and some brief encounters with a doctor, she was told she had indigestion and sent home. That was the good news."
"The bad news was the bill: $995 for the ambulance ride, $3000 for the doctors and $17,000 for the hospital--in sum, $21,000 for a false alarm."
The above is a quote from a remarkable cover story by Steven Brill in Time magazine this week. Its title is "Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us." At 26,000 words and 36 pages it is the longest feature story Time has ever published, and probably one of the most important.
I'd like to think that every reader of this blog will take the 2-1/2 hours or so required to read the entire article, but I doubt that will be the case so I will hit the important points for you over the course of several posts.
Unfortunately, situations like that of Janice S. are the norm. A WNY retiree recently appeared at a nearby hospital for his angiogram appointment at 6 AM. (Angiograms check for the amount of blockage in blood vessels feeding the heart.) By 1 PM he was eating lunch at a local restaurant. The bill for the morning's activities: $18,000.
Brill posits that we have been arguing about the wrong healthcare question: Who should pay our healthcare bills? Instead, he addresses a more important question: Why are our healthcare bills so high?
"What are the reasons, good or bad, that cancer means a half-million-or million-dollar tab? Why should a trip to the emergency room for chest pains that turn out to be indigestion bring a bill that can exceed the cost of a semester of college? What makes a single dose of even the most wonderful wonder drug cost thousands of dollars? Why does simple lab work done during a few days in a hospital cost more than a car? And what is so different about the medical ecosystem that causes technology advances to drive bills up instead of down?"
Long-time readers of this blog know that I think a lot about healthcare and have devoted many posts to the American system and others around the world.
Personally, I have wondered why it is that 10 ml (about 2/3 of a tablespoon) of an eyedrop I use every day costs almost $300 if purchased without insurance at the Walmart pharmacy. Do these drops contain the tears of real angels?
Ten years ago, my father spent the last month of his life in a Buffalo hospital. The bill for the month came to almost $40,000. Medicare would pay a little less than $10,000 and the hospital was happy to receive that amount. A hospital happy with getting 25-cents on the dollar of its bill--what's happening here?
It turns out that the healthcare marketplace is not a marketplace at all. What I learned from Brill astounded me and gave me a totally new picture of healthcare costs. You may be surprised to find that while you are powerless in what Brill describes as "the ultimate sellers' market," health insurance companies are increasingly finding themselves in the same position.
I'll share some of what I learned over the next few posts, but I urge you to get ahead of me and read the article. You can get it by clicking on its title above. Let me warn those of you with high blood pressure that what you learn will make you mad enough to make your medication necessary!
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