Health Care Costs: Real Life Example

(1) Quality care administered without interference from insurance companies.

(2) Affordable health care.

(3) Health care provided for all American citizens regardless of age or preconditions.

If you haven’t experienced undue influence from insurance companies standing in the way of medical care recommended by your doctor, you don’t live in the United States.

Such negative influence is so rampant and frequent that doctors are now intimidated to the point of no longer recommending procedures that they know will be denied by non-medical employees of insurance companies.

We all are aware that every American citizen doesn’t have health insurance. This is a difficult issue to resolve without placing a financial burden on the masses in order to provide health care for the approximately 20% of American citizens who are uninsured.

Physicians, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies can certainly afford to tackle and resolve this problem from the depths of their capitalistic hearts if they so choose. Don’t be so naïve as to assume this will ever occur.

I saved the issue of affordable health care to last. If you take the time to read your hospital bill, or note the cost of certain prescription medications, how could you ever deny that health care costs are completely out of control? Allow me to provide a personal example of my recent experience with an absurdly high hospital bill.

I had a procedure that required an injection into my lower back and spine to relieve hip pain. The itemized hospital bill, excluding physician fees and imaging interpretation fees, is shown below:

Prescriptions: $185.33

Hospital Outpatient: $159.00

Radiology (5 images): $1,902.26

Surgery: $487.00

MRI: $3,905.00

TOTAL: $6,638.59

The only thing I can remotely associate with “prescriptions” is the substance injected into my lower back and hip. If true, it must have been laced with platinum and gold.

The “Hospital Outpatient” fee is really difficult to accept. I get a shot in my hip while in the imaging room for less than 2 hours and that classifies me as an “Outpatient”? This stretches the definition of “outpatient” to the outer limits of the audacity of fee structures that pad the bottom line of the hospital.

Five x-rays at a fee of just under $2,000.00. Apparently the hospital pro-rates every use of their machines to cover their daily overhead cost for each machine. Heaven help you if you are the only patient to be x-rayed on a given day because you might be charged $50,000.00 for your one x-ray.

The MRI fee was just under $4,000.00 and again I must assume that it follows the same overhead procedure as does the x-ray machine.

The bottom-line is that the total hospital bill for a shot in my hip, excluding physician fees and imaging interpretation fees, was billed to my insurance company at a cost of $6,638.59!!! I don’t know about you, but I consider this bill to be totally outrageous. So what can be done?

Well, firstly it’s too late for me to do anything about this specific hospital bill. However, if Obama is serious about lowering health care costs why hasn’t he proposed cost-controls and fee-structured limits on physicians, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and other health care related companies? Certainly this could be done without writing a 1,018 page Congressional Bill (HR3200). Also, the language in such a new bill could be toned-down to something totally understandable and without the need for any uncertain interpretation. Implementation of such a Bill would be simple and straight-forward and wouldn’t require an army of new employees and a myriad of computers to implement and maintain all of the bureaucratic specifics and nuances of HR3200.

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