Yes, that’s what I thought. ‘Hospitals are too expensive’ is certainly true but it isn’t a policy proposal. The Lowry piece reads like standard empty punditry to me.
Really? I mean, I hate on Trump’s corruption as much as anyone, but ambassadorships have always been about the graft in the US.
The bribes are just a lot more open now. Used to have to hide them as campaign contributions or nods and winks. Now you just pay directly.
Those charts and others like them starkly highlight just how little economic growth and success traditional GOP stronghold areas and industries have had in recent years. And yet somehow it’s Trump and the Republicans who are responsible for all the economic growth and success in America, despite none of it benefitting the majority of the people who vote for them. Enriching the libs to own the libs?
It’s a perfect example of how the GOP is almost totally dependent on their messaging now. They can’t actually deliver much of anything to the people who vote for them, so they simply go out and spin everything (along with their Conservative media partners). It’s a house built on lies and deception…and yet it’s unbelievably difficult to topple even when evidence like those charts exposes it clearly.
This is excellent.
Now there’s a far-right position I am entirely in favor of.
No pharmaceuticals are. Hospitals are constantly finding themselves paying scalpers prices on pharma goods because middle men buy them all up, then hold them hostage. Of course the every day medicine you and I pay for are insane. It’s not hospitals themselves who are to blame… it’s the goods they depend on - and those are the things Republicans refuse to do anything about because greed.
Really, key drivers of health care spending can be any organization that gets monopoly power. In many cases, that is pharmaceutical companies, but there are other villains as well.
In some, primarily rural, health care markets, a single hospital association has an effective monopoly on health care and charges whatever they can get out of the insurance companies; their prices end up matching flagship teaching hospitals in big cities, even though their costs and quality of care are much lower. The hospitals end up being ridiculously profitable, and the association uses those profits to expand to other markets and drive out competition there.
This is why hospitals should always be non-profit. Profit plus healthcare equals something’s gotta give. And in these scenarios it’s always the patient that loses. Either through skimpy, sub-par care or over-priced services.
I’d say that health insurance should also be non-profit. There are endeavors where maximizing profits isn’t appropriate, and I’d put heathcare into that category.
Very true…but at least previous presidents weren’t giving Medal of Freedom to their biggest donors as payoff.
“Non-Profit” Hospitals are often anything but. In fact, in 2017, 7 of the 10 most profitable hospitals in the U.S. were non-profits. Non-Profits cost communities across the U.S. billions of dollars in lost tax revenue and tax levies, all while having some of the highest compensation rates, patient billing rates and bottom lines of any hospitals anywhere.
http://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2017/04/25/the-fairy-tale-of-a-non-profit-hospital/
The path to better healthcare lies in deconstructing the system that exists today and rebuilding it. Not as “Free Healthcare for Everyone” like many progressive candidates like to tout, but as “Common Sense Managed and Regulated Healthcare for Everyone”, which is far less sexy, but far more sustainable in the long term. Provide uniform costs and a uniform standard of care across the board, and you can pay for it all with employer payroll taxes that replace the current ridiculous health insurance boondoggle.
No not really. Hospital cost represent 32% of the cost of US Health Care, prescription drugs are only 10%, physician and clinic fees are #2 at 20%. The remaining 38% is made up of a bunch of other things.
We spent $1,000/per person/year on drugs even if drugs were free, our health care cost would only decrease to $9300/person.
That blog post cites a study that showed the exact opposite: for profit hospitals are generally more profitable than not-for-profit hospitals.
It’s a bad idea to base policy on the characteristics of outliers, like the top ten. It’s particularly bad in this case because the vast majority of hospitals are not-for-profit, so pointing out that they constitute 7 out of 10 on any ranking is not useful.
EDIT:
Worse still, this study only looked at inpatient acute care “profitability”, without taking into account the rest of the health care system. It was criticized for this, and the authors responded that this was the only data they could easily access.
The problem is that hospitals frequently use inpatients as a loss-leader for more profitable outpatient operations. Accordingly, this study found that about half of inpatient services produce a net loss. That’s a red flag: if the entire health system consistently lost money on operations, it would close down. So the study is basically like making a top ten list of “most profitable groceries” by only looking at the money they make on their milk sales.
Again, I might be completely biased as I used to work in the pharmaceutical industry, but drug costs are high because they are re-couping R&D and marketing costs.
The reason why a routine knee MRI would cost 4,500$ isn’t R&D and marketing costs, it is just inflated prices due to our insurance system.
This happens with drugs too, but at least with most pharma companies, they only have 20 years to make money on a drug, so they tend to charge a lot. R&D is expensive, it takes decades to get some drugs approved, and millions and millions of dollars. These companies also waste a massive amount on marketing too, which isn’t helpful to consumers, just to the drug companies.
I think drugs are easy to blame because there is so little surface substance to it, it is just a little pill, why does it cost so much?
I am not going to give drug companies a free pass for the price gouging or price fixing that is discovered however, but it is important to understand that you can spend 10 years and a Billion dollars making pill X, you gotta charge 2,000 a pill to make that back. We either need to change this system or do something to reign in costs or this will never change.
Well the machines aren’t exactly cheap either, and a number of clinics are using machines that are actually owned by hospital. For example, the ultrasound machine in some practices might not actually be owned by the practice but the health system, one of the hospitals, they are a part of. Everyone always wants the new fancy stuff too, not the machine that’s been sitting there for a decade and is paid for.
It’s complex system, and anyone trying to point to one boogeyman in it is not approaching it properly. This particular issue though is also not the fault of just one part. It’s not like the GOP woke up and created it. The US also trains a lot doctors, from other countries, tons of them.
I agree, the myth that if only “profit was out of the system”, health care would work in America is one of our most dangerous beliefs. The largest health care provider in the county Blue Cross Blue Shield is a non-profit corporation (although, many of its licenses aren’t). Kaiser Permanente, the largest managed care providers, is also a non-profit. Only 18% of hospitals in this country are for profit, 62% are non-profit and 20% are government run.
Given that hospitals are the biggest cost driver of health care in the country, it is pretty hard to blame “corporate profits” on skyrocketing health care cost. The opaque pricing in all of the healthcare system makes cost comparisons virtually impossible, so I sympathize with the authors of the study.
It is clear, that even though these hospital and BCBS provides are “non-profit” and don’t enrich their shareholders, with those evil profits derived from bankrupting poor people, plenty of folks working for these non-profits are getting very rich indeed. Million+ salaries are common for top administrators in hospitals and plenty of doctors make over $500K working there.
In addition, these non-profits stifle competition because of their tax-exempt status. I know in my state Kaiser and the BCBS affiliate have a duopoly on providing medical care. The exemption from property tax, state excise tax, and corporate taxes makes it virtually impossible for any other providers to enter the market.
There is a reasonable argument that health care is one of those markets where profits don’t work well. But the problems of US health care system isn’t greedy corporations trying to make a profit, if anything it is greedy non-profit corporations.
I think I remember reading about this too, how the U.S. is always working with the newest technologies. A lot of other countries make do with a 10 year old MRI that is “good enough” and are happy with that.
This does happen in the U.S. as well, I had to get a Brain MRI (I am fine) and I went to a smaller clinic that probably had older equipment, but my insurance covered it, and my out of pocket costs were only like 200$ with 80% paid by insurance. IF I had gone to the large university hospital, it would have been closer to 500$
But, the problem with a lot of health insurances, like HMO’s is that they make you use the expensive in-network machines, which ends up being a lower cost, because the HMO owns the machine, or is the main partner and gets a deal. The downside of a healthcare plan with options is that when a doctor orders a test, I have to look up where I am covered and what is the cheapest, I do the legwork there. And often times I have to schlep 30 minutes across town to get a blood draw that costs 50$ or have it done in the clinic where it was ordered for like 300$
The whole system is a mess.
Though, I look at the thread title, and I think we have veered off topic a bit.