Time Magazine This is an incredible article that goes into great detail as to why American medical bills are so high despite not providing superior medical care. In particular it focuses on why the government is focusing on the question of "who should pay" rather than the more intelligent question "why charges are so high and largely unrelated to costs."
======================
[....] The total cost, in advance, for Sean to get his treatment plan and initial doses of chemotherapy was $83,900. Why?
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.
Dozens of midpriced items were embedded with similarly aggressive
markups, like $283.00 for a “CHEST, PA AND LAT 71020.” That’s a simple
chest X-ray, for which MD Anderson is routinely paid $20.44 when it
treats a patient on Medicare, the government health care program for the
elderly.
Every time a nurse drew blood, a “ROUTINE VENIPUNCTURE” charge of
$36.00 appeared, accompanied by charges of $23 to $78 for each of a
dozen or more lab analyses performed on the blood sample. In all, the
charges for blood and other lab tests done on Recchi amounted to more
than $15,000. Had Recchi been old enough for Medicare, MD Anderson would
have been paid a few hundred dollars for all those tests. By law,
Medicare’s payments approximate a hospital’s cost of providing a
service, including overhead, equipment and salaries.
On the second page of the bill, the markups got bolder. Recchi was
charged $13,702 for “1 RITUXIMAB INJ 660 MG.” That’s an injection of
660 mg of a cancer wonder drug called Rituxan. The average price paid by
all hospitals for this dose is about $4,000, but MD Anderson probably
gets a volume discount that would make its cost $3,000 to $3,500. That
means the nonprofit cancer center’s paid-in-advance markup on Recchi’s
lifesaving shot would be about 400%. [...]