Problems with healthcare
Healthcare has become outrageously expensive in America and for no good reason besides corporate greed.
Here’s my legal tip: Hospitals are now required by federal regulation to list their prices on their websites. If you google a hospital’s name combined with the keywords “price transparency” and “standard pricing” it should bring you to the hospital’s page that will have downloadable files for you to read with all the prices. Not only that, but the pricing lists also show you the lowest and highest rates that different insurance companies get.
I noticed something strange though…The point of the federal regulation is to make prices TRANSPARENT. So I thought it was funny when I went to Baystate’s pricing list and found a 15,000 page document in JSTOR format. For those of you unfamiliar with JSTOR, it’s a damn near incomprehensible computer language and it came in a file so large that when I searched for a key word in the file it crashed. How is that transparent??? Some hospitals really want to keep prices mysterious, others have taken the regulation more seriously.
For example, Yale hospital has a very organized excel sheet on their website. So do some other hospitals in Connecticut. Hartford hospital and some branches of Baystate use the incomprehensible JSTOR files to keep pricing unclear. Another thing I noticed is that some procedures vary wildly in pricing between hospitals. In one hospital an EKG costs $300, in another $3,000. In what other industry do you see pricing for the SAME item increase tenfold by locality?Could you imagine going to one gas station where gas is $4 a gallon but down the street it’s $40 a gallon? … Some healthcare activists attribute the dramatic pricing differences to the lack of an open market in healthcare. Since insurance companies have so much leverage and influence over hospitals there hasn’t been the same opportunity to let the “invisible hand” of the market dictate prices. Rather, pricing is controlled by insurance negotiations. I’m not sure what the solution is but you got people coming from Canada to America to avoid the long wait lists in a country with socialized healthcare and then you got American’s going to Mexico or Spain where open heart surgery can cost as low as $15k while in USA it’s over a quarter of a million. Anyway, check out your hospitals local pricing, it’s interesting.