My Medical Bill
Saturday, July 23, 2011 at 6:00AM I just received my medical bill for a procedure that was done one year ago. The delay was an accounting error. But this does give me an opportunity to talk about medical expenses. The bill was for $835. The insurance paid about $375. I paid $85. Where is the rest of the bill, you might ask? Well the $835-$375-$85 leaves $375. This is the amount of a deduction I get because I have insurance. It is called the contracted rate. If I do not have insurance, I pay the full amount of $835.
This highlights a big problem in our medical system. The poor pay more than everyone else—that is, the poor who are working and do not qualify for Medicaid. A bill like this is just not going to be paid by someone without insurance making 
$17,000 for one night in the hospital!minimum wage. The fact this bill is not paid by this kind of patient is factored into the price, and then everyone pays for it. It is a vicious circle. What would the cost be if insurance, the hospitals, and yes, even us patients, were not gaming the system? No one knows, but my guess is that it would be less than $400-maybe a lot less.
If I could actually pay the discounted amount on all my medical bills it would be cheaper than my insurance bill is every month. Of course I would still need catastrophic insurance-but maybe not. When I had cancer surgery, the bill for my Hospital stay was $17,000. This was for one night. Since I was at a hospital that was in my network, they dropped it to $2000. In the year I was the sickest, my medical bills, if they had been at the free market rate, would have been less than my insurance bill every year. The whole system is corrupt.
So for our very expensive health care, do we receive good value?
Chart from Zero Hedge
There are many reasons for the expense of our system and our relatively low life expectancy—the way things are measured, for example, make things look worse than they are. But the structure of our health system is to blame. No doubt the people in the system are doing the best they can, but the system itself makes progress difficult.
Health Care 2015?
In our system the young do not get the care they need, and the old get too much. I am not sure I would go as far as former Colorado Governor Lamb who said the old had a duty to die, but this is a problem that is not being addressed. Sarah Palin was wrong, we do need death panels. If we don't eventually have them, the whole system will collapse like a proverbial house of cards.
One final note: In any other industry, charging such violently different rates would be illegal—and the people that did it would go to jail.
Reader Comments (1)
Japan, according to the chart , appears to live longer and do so at a lower cost as well.
Lets just copy the Japan plan to the letter.
Eddie H. Nessul
Amboy, California
(Read Names Backwards!)