Pensacola Discussion Forum
Would you like to react to this message? Create an account in a few clicks or log in to continue.

This is a forum based out of Pensacola Florida.


You are not connected. Please login or register

Finally someone in the media discovers the real truth about our health care crisis.

+4
Markle
ZVUGKTUBM
Floridatexan
Hospital Bob
8 posters

Go down  Message [Page 1 of 1]

Hospital Bob

Hospital Bob

Journalist Steven Brill writing in Time Magazine finally gets it.
He has written an exhaustive cover story entitled "Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us".
As I've been trying to tell you, the problem is the escalating costs and neither democrat nor republican solutions are addressing that.

To whet your appetite for it, here's a short interview he gave on television tonight which will outline what he's reporting.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3036697/#51042602

And if that gets you interested, here is the whole lengthy Time Magazine article...

http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/

Floridatexan

Floridatexan

Bob wrote:Journalist Steven Brill writing in Time Magazine finally gets it.
He has written an exhaustive cover story entitled "Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us".
As I've been trying to tell you, the problem is the escalating costs and neither democrat nor republican solutions are addressing that.

To whet your appetite for it, here's a short interview he gave on television tonight which will outline what he's reporting.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3036697/#51042602

And if that gets you interested, here is the whole lengthy Time Magazine article...

http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/

Thanks, Bob. Krugman referenced this article in the piece I posted.

Hospital Bob

Hospital Bob

from the article...

"When we debate health care policy, we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high?"

ZVUGKTUBM

ZVUGKTUBM

http://www.best-electric-barbecue-grills.com

ZVUGKTUBM

ZVUGKTUBM

It was a good article, and it reaffirmed my notion that death may be an acceptable alternative to being fleeced by the healthcare system.

http://www.best-electric-barbecue-grills.com

Markle

Markle

Bob wrote:from the article...

"When we debate health care policy, we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high?"


That's simple.

People expect miracles and their doctor to be God. When they don't come up to that standard, but did tests A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H and I, the attorney will sue saying the doctor did NOT DO TEST "J". The insurance company steps in, the attorney collects $1 million, the patient $2 million and everyone is happy.

Then why do you believe that the United States develops more new drugs, drug appliances and technology than the rest of the world. That costs trillions and trillions of dollars with a relatively payback period before their patent expires.

The other reason is Mandates. Which will skyrocket with ObamaCare. What do you think the reason is for the health insurance premiums in one state to be double that of an adjoining state?

Hospital Bob

Hospital Bob

Markle wrote:
Bob wrote:from the article...

"When we debate health care policy, we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high?"


That's simple.

People expect miracles and their doctor to be God. When they don't come up to that standard, but did tests A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H and I, the attorney will sue saying the doctor did NOT DO TEST "J". The insurance company steps in, the attorney collects $1 million, the patient $2 million and everyone is happy.



The CBO investigated this first in 2004 and again in 2009.
In 2004, the CBO calculated malpractice costs amounted to “less than 2 percent of overall health care spending". So, even a reduction of 25 percent to 30 percent in malpractice costs would lower health care costs by only about 0.4 percent to 0.5 percent, and the likely effect on health insurance premiums would be comparably small.
Five years later, the CBO revisited the issue of medical negligence costs. This time, they attempted to account for the indirect costs of medical negligence, mainly the idea that doctors order extra tests to avoid liability. Again, the CBO found that tort reform would only save 0.5 percent of all health care costs.

Hospital Bob

Hospital Bob

Markle wrote:
Bob wrote:from the article...

"When we debate health care policy, we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high?"


That's simple.

the United States develops more new drugs, drug appliances and technology than the rest of the world. That costs trillions and trillions of dollars with a relatively payback period before their patent expires.


Pharmaceutical research and development: what do we get for all that money?

http://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e4348?ijkey=Y1g4ZVUImIbtXOI&keytype=ref

Hospital Bob

Hospital Bob

Markle wrote:
Bob wrote:from the article...

"When we debate health care policy, we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high?"


That's simple.

The other reason is Mandates. Which will skyrocket with ObamaCare.


If you'd bother to read the article (or even listen to the interview for that matter) you would know that Brill believes all obamacare will accomplish is to increase the size of an already broken system.

Hospital Bob

Hospital Bob

For markle, who's already knee-jerk reacted that this whole report has to be "liberal/progressive" because for markel and millions of others no issue can be viewed in any other way than detremining whether it's either "liberal/progressive" or "conservative/Republican".

From Brill's report, markle...

__________________________________

2. Medical Technology’s Perverse Economics


Unlike those of almost any other area we can think of, the dynamics of the medical marketplace seem to be such that the advance of technology has made medical care more expensive, not less. First, it appears to encourage more procedures and treatment by making them easier and more convenient. (This is especially true for procedures like arthroscopic surgery.) Second, there is little patient pushback against higher costs because it seems to (and often does) result in safer, better care and because the customer getting the treatment is either not going to pay for it or not going to know the price until after the fact.

Beyond the hospitals’ and doctors’ obvious economic incentives to use the equipment and the manufacturers’ equally obvious incentives to sell it, there’s a legal incentive at work. Giving Janice S. a nuclear-imaging test instead of the lower-tech, less expensive stress test was the safer thing to do — a belt-and-suspenders approach that would let the hospital and doctor say they pulled out all the stops in case Janice S. died of a heart attack after she was sent home.

“We use the CT scan because it’s a great defense,” says the CEO of another hospital not far from Stamford. “For example, if anyone has fallen or done anything around their head — hell, if they even say the word head — we do it to be safe. We can’t be sued for doing too much.”

His rationale speaks to the real cost issue associated with medical-malpractice litigation. It’s not as much about the verdicts or settlements (or considerable malpractice-insurance premiums) that hospitals and doctors pay as it is about what they do to avoid being sued. And some no doubt claim they are ordering more tests to avoid being sued when it is actually an excuse for hiking profits. The most practical malpractice-reform proposals would not limit awards for victims but would allow doctors to use what’s called a safe-harbor defense. Under safe harbor, a defendant doctor or hospital could argue that the care provided was within the bounds of what peers have established as reasonable under the circumstances. The typical plaintiff argument that doing something more, like a nuclear-imaging test, might have saved the patient would then be less likely to prevail.

When Obamacare was being debated, Republicans pushed this kind of commonsense malpractice-tort reform. But the stranglehold that plaintiffs’ lawyers have traditionally had on Democrats prevailed, and neither a safe-harbor provision nor any other malpractice reform was included.





Hospital Bob

Hospital Bob

Nonprofit Profitmakers

in small towns and cities across the country, the local nonprofit hospital may be the community’s strongest business, typically making tens of millions of dollars a year and paying its nondoctor administrators six or seven figures. As nonprofits, such hospitals solicit contributions, and their annual charity dinner, a showcase for their good works, is typically a major civic event. But charitable gifts are a minor part of their base; Stamford Hospital raised just over 1% of its revenue from contributions last year. Even after discounts, those $199.50 blood tests and multithousand-dollar CT scans are what really count.

Thus, according to the latest publicly available tax return it filed with the IRS, for the fiscal year ending September 2011, Stamford Hospital — in a midsize city serving an unusually high 50% share of highly discounted Medicare and Medicaid patients — managed an operating profit of $63 million on revenue actually received (after all the discounts off the chargemaster) of $495 million. That’s a 12.7% operating profit margin, which would be the envy of shareholders of high-service businesses across other sectors of the economy.

Its nearly half-billion dollars in revenue also makes Stamford Hospital by far the city’s largest business serving only local residents. In fact, the hospital’s revenue exceeded all money paid to the city of Stamford in taxes and fees. The hospital is a bigger business than its host city.

There is nothing special about the hospital’s fortunes. Its operating profit margin is about the same as the average for all nonprofit hospitals, 11.7%, even when those that lose money are included. And Stamford’s 12.7% was tallied after the hospital paid a slew of high salaries to its management, including $744,000 to its chief financial officer and $1,860,000 to CEO Grissler.

In fact, when McKinsey, aided by a Bank of America survey, pulled together all hospital financial reports, it found that the 2,900 nonprofit hospitals across the country, which are exempt from income taxes, actually end up averaging higher operating profit margins than the 1,000 for-profit hospitals after the for-profits’ income-tax obligations are deducted. In health care, being nonprofit produces more profit.

Nonetheless, hospitals like Stamford are able to use their sympathetic nonprofit status to push their interests. As the debate over deficit-cutting ideas related to health care has heated up, the American Hospital Association has run daily ads on Mike Allen’s Playbook, a popular Washington tip sheet, urging that Congress not be allowed to cut hospital payments because that would endanger the “$39.3 billion” in uncompensated care for the poor that hospitals now provide either through charity programs or because of patients failing to pay their debts. Based on the formula hospitals use to calculate the cost of this charity care, that amounts to approximately 5% of their total revenue for 2010.

Under Internal Revenue Service rules, nonprofits are not prohibited from taking in more money than they spend. They just can’t distribute the overage to shareholders — because they don’t have any shareholders.

So, what do these wealthy nonprofits do with all the profit? In a trend similar to what we’ve seen in nonprofit colleges and universities — where there has been an arms race of sorts to use rising tuition to construct buildings and add courses of study — the hospitals improve and expand facilities (despite the fact that the U.S. has more hospital beds than it can fill), buy more equipment, hire more people, offer more services, buy rival hospitals and then raise executive salaries because their operations have gotten so much larger. They keep the upward spiral going by marketing for more patients, raising prices and pushing harder to collect bill payments. Only with health care, the upward spiral is easier to sustain. Health care is seen as even more of a necessity than higher education. And unlike in higher education, in health care there is little price transparency — and far less competition in any given locale even if there were transparency. Besides, a hospital is typically one of the community’s larger employers if not the largest, so there is unlikely to be much local complaining about its burgeoning economic fortunes.

They have become entities akin to low-risk, must-have public utilities that nonetheless pay their operators as if they were high-risk entrepreneurs. As with the local electric company, customers must have the product and can’t go elsewhere to buy it. They are steered to a hospital by their insurance companies or doctors (whose practices may have a business alliance with the hospital or even be owned by it). Or they end up there because there isn’t any local competition. But unlike with the electric company, no regulator caps hospital profits.






Hospital Bob

Hospital Bob

The 2011 outpatient visit of someone I’ll call Steve H. to Mercy Hospital in Oklahoma City illustrates those economics. Steve H. had the kind of relatively routine care that patients might expect would be no big deal: he spent the day at Mercy getting his aching back fixed.

A blue collar worker who was in his 30s at the time and worked at a local retail store, Steve H. had consulted a specialist at Mercy in the summer of 2011 and was told that a stimulator would have to be surgically implanted in his back. The good news was that with all the advances of modern technology, the whole process could be done in a day. (The latest federal filing shows that 63% of surgeries at Mercy were performed on outpatients.)

Steve H.’s doctor intended to use a RestoreUltra neurostimulator manufactured by Medtronic, a Minneapolis-based company with $16 billion in annual sales that bills itself as the world’s largest stand-alone medical-technology company. “RestoreUltra delivers spinal-cord stimulation through one or more leads selected from a broad portfolio for greater customization of therapy,” Medtronic’s website promises. I was not able to interview Steve H., but according to Pat Palmer, a medical-billing specialist based in Salem, Va., who consults for the union that provides Steve H.’s health insurance, Steve H. didn’t ask how much the stimulator would cost because he had $45,181 remaining on the $60,000 annual payout limit his union-sponsored health-insurance plan imposed. “He figured, How much could a day at Mercy cost?” Palmer says. “Five thousand? Maybe 10?”

Steve H. was about to run up against a seemingly irrelevant footnote in millions of Americans’ insurance policies: the limit, sometimes annual or sometimes over a lifetime, on what the insurer has to pay out for a patient’s claims. Under Obamacare, those limits will not be allowed in most health-insurance policies after 2013. That might help people like Steve H. but is also one of the reasons premiums are going to skyrocket under Obamacare.

Chest X-Ray
Patient was charged $333. the national rate paid by Medicare is $23.83

Steve H.’s bill for his day at Mercy contained all the usual and customary overcharges. One item was “MARKER SKIN REG TIP RULER” for $3. That’s the marking pen, presumably reusable, that marked the place on Steve H.’s back where the incision was to go. Six lines down, there was “STRAP OR TABLE 8X27 IN” for $31. That’s the strap used to hold Steve H. onto the operating table. Just below that was “BLNKT WARM UPPER BDY 42268” for $32. That’s a blanket used to keep surgery patients warm. It is, of course, reusable, and it’s available new on eBay for $13. Four lines down there’s “GOWN SURG ULTRA XLG 95121” for $39, which is the gown the surgeon wore. Thirty of them can be bought online for $180. Neither Medicare nor any large insurance company would pay a hospital separately for those straps or the surgeon’s gown; that’s all supposed to come with the facility fee paid to the hospital, which in this case was $6,289.

In all, Steve H.’s bill for these basic medical and surgical supplies was $7,882. On top of that was $1,837 under a category called “Pharmacy General Classification” for items like bacitracin ($108). But that was the least of Steve H.’s problems.

The big-ticket item for Steve H.’s day at Mercy was the Medtronic stimulator, and that’s where most of Mercy’s profit was collected during his brief visit. The bill for that was $49,237.

According to the chief financial officer of another hospital, the wholesale list price of the Medtronic stimulator is “about $19,000.” Because Mercy is part of a major hospital chain, it might pay 5% to 15% less than that. Even assuming Mercy paid $19,000, it would make more than $30,000 selling it to Steve H., a profit margin of more than 150%. To the extent that I found any consistency among hospital chargemaster practices, this is one of them: hospitals routinely seem to charge 21⁄2 times what these expensive implantable devices cost them, which produces that 150% profit margin.

As Steve H. found out when he got his bill, he had exceeded the $45,000 that was left on his insurance policy’s annual payout limit just with the neurostimulator. And his total bill was $86,951. After his insurance paid that first $45,000, he still owed more than $40,000, not counting doctors’ bills. (I did not see Steve H.’s doctors’ bills.)

PBulldog2

PBulldog2

Bob wrote:from the article...

"When we debate health care policy, we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high?"


Hallelujah. That's what I've been saying all along.

Hospital Bob

Hospital Bob

Put simply, with Obamacare we’ve changed the rules related to who pays for what, but we haven’t done much to change the prices we pay.

When you follow the money, you see the choices we’ve made, knowingly or unknowingly.

Over the past few decades, we’ve enriched the labs, drug companies, medical device makers, hospital administrators and purveyors of CT scans, MRIs, canes and wheelchairs. Meanwhile, we’ve squeezed the doctors who don’t own their own clinics, don’t work as drug or device consultants or don’t otherwise game a system that is so gameable. And of course, we’ve squeezed everyone outside the system who gets stuck with the bills.

We’ve created a secure, prosperous island in an economy that is suffering under the weight of the riches those on the island extract.

And we’ve allowed those on the island and their lobbyists and allies to control the debate, diverting us from what Gerard Anderson, a health care economist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says is the obvious and only issue: “All the prices are too damn high.”


Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/#ixzz2MftshyIo

Hospital Bob

Hospital Bob

PBulldog2 wrote:
Bob wrote:from the article...

"When we debate health care policy, we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high?"


Hallelujah. That's what I've been saying all along.

PB,

I happened across this and thought you might want to watch it. It's Brill talking about the article he wrote.

http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-inside-times-cover-story-on-medical-bills/

ZVUGKTUBM

ZVUGKTUBM

I was also shocked when I read this article (and posted it here) 10 days ago.

You simply can not afford to get sick in America any more. I spent 10 days in Sacred Heart (7 days in intensive care) back in December of 2008, and I never want to go there again.

Brill's expose was brilliant and very detailed. Next he needs to write another article to see where the money actually winds up. It no doubt finds its way into some oligarch's pocket.

http://www.best-electric-barbecue-grills.com

Guest


Guest

Markle wrote:
Bob wrote:from the article...

"When we debate health care policy, we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high?"


That's simple.

People expect miracles and their doctor to be God. When they don't come up to that standard, but did tests A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H and I, the attorney will sue saying the doctor did NOT DO TEST "J". The insurance company steps in, the attorney collects $1 million, the patient $2 million and everyone is happy.

Then why do you believe that the United States develops more new drugs, drug appliances and technology than the rest of the world. That costs trillions and trillions of dollars with a relatively payback period before their patent expires.

The other reason is Mandates. Which will skyrocket with ObamaCare. What do you think the reason is for the health insurance premiums in one state to be double that of an adjoining state?


..........................................

Your responses should be written in crayon on a Big Chief pad.


There is nothing so complex that it cannot be over-simplified by a partisan zealot.

NaNook

NaNook

Bob wrote:from the article...

"When we debate health care policy, we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high?"


The first question is who will pay the bills. Ask any hospital, they will attach any assets for unpaid bills. Homes, cars, bank accounts, etc. Meanwhile, the poor are treated with no payment expected as they have no assets.

Oh, the irony. A taxpayer pays twice, just as they do with dividend income. Double Middle Class Tax..as usual.....

Margin Call

Margin Call

NaNook wrote:
Bob wrote:from the article...

"When we debate health care policy, we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high?"


The first question is who will pay the bills. Ask any hospital, they will attach any assets for unpaid bills. Homes, cars, bank accounts, etc. Meanwhile, the poor are treated with no payment expected as they have no assets.

Oh, the irony. A taxpayer pays twice, just as they do with dividend income. Double Middle Class Tax..as usual.....

Self-pay is sometimes cheaper than using insurance. How many people ask before presenting an insurance card?

Hospital Bob

Hospital Bob

Margin Call wrote:
Self-pay is sometimes cheaper than using insurance. How many people ask before presenting an insurance card?

Since my insurance pays nothing for anything until I reach a $2500 annual deductible, I have to pay out of pocket for everything so I do become aware of how this plays out
It's just more weirdness.
On the one hand, my insurance involvement does get me an insurance negotiated discount which usually makes the price better than if I was a no-insurance patient.
However, I have a friend who has no insurance and since he pays cash and doesn't involve the providers with having to do the insurance related paperwork, he routinely is able to negotiate an even better price than my insurance-negotiated prices. Sometimes significantly better. But he has to do this after he's billed the retail price and then goes to the provider's billing department to negotiate the discounted price. And of course many would never know they can do what he does so they just go ahead and pay the full retail.
It's all pretty convoluted.

Hospital Bob

Hospital Bob

If you read the Brill article, you will see one thing which figures prominently into what he discovered. And it's something the hospitals call the "chargemaster". I had never heard of this term before but it's apparently one of the goofiest things of all and they all use it.

Jake92



One thing is there are many many illegal aliens or non working/non insured people getting care. Look in ANY emergency room. They pay with a check thatr bounces and rather than go after them, the loss is averaged in to everybody elses bill. WHY does 1 stinking bandaid cost $30.00???? The nurse hands you one if you ask for it at the nurses station and YOU put it on yourself, but it's still $30.00 on your bill.

Sponsored content



Back to top  Message [Page 1 of 1]

Permissions in this forum:
You cannot reply to topics in this forum