Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Yes, it is.

Between the hospital, medicines, staff, OR, nurses and ICU room, my insurance was billed close to $300K for my open heart in December. They settled at $85K total payment.

This seems like BS to me, from the medical side, that they have to bill so much to get paid so much less.

Just figure a number and pay it. Why the bullshit?

$85K and I was in for 4 nights. In Switzerland it would have been around $15K USD.

That's f'd up.

I’d assume the bullshit is the negotiations and free market at work?

where is the $15k from?

I’d assume the bullshit is the negotiations and free market at work?

where is the $15k from?

Googles.

As for the cost, I'd say attorneys and lawsuits. Insurance is very expensive here because of that.

LoL.  This is typical socialist nonsense.  Partial socialism caused the problem so then blame the free market and call for more socialism as the solution. 

Then when that makes it worse, blame the free market again and call for even more socialism as to solution.  Rinse, repeat. 

How many people have to die from the effects of socialism before we figure out that central planning doesn't work very well? 

Can you put a number on that for me?  Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot just to name the three worst probably killed an order of magnitude more than the NAZIs and apparently that isn't enough.  What would be? 

See, this is part of the problem with making politics an enormous part of your personality. You end up addressing actual questions with a canned talking points.

I’m a free markets guy. Don’t you worry. (and the Swiss system is plenty planned)

badge asked why there is that pricing gap. The hospital sets a high number because the insurance companies use their leverage to try to set the prices they want. So the providers set higher numbers to go into those negotiations with. That’s capitalism at work. It’s not good or bad, it’s just a free market.

I have heard hospital bills get inflated to pay the bill for those who don't or can't.  So, if you can pay, it's for them and you.

When I mentioned insurance in my last post, I was talking about liability insurance for doctors and hospitals.

I know what I pay for liability insurance for my company, and we ain't doing surgeries.

This is a very big reason why HC costs are so high. 

30 years ago when my wife was pregnant with our son, I accompanied her to one of her doctor appointments. I don't remember how we got onto the topic, but we began to talk about HC costs. He is\was an OBGYN in a small rural community and at that time, was paying well into six figures for liability insurance. This was when we thought that paying $50 for a routine pregnancy check was a huge amount of money. 

And after our discussion, I can see why his rates were they way they were. 

Healthcare in the US is such a giant clusterf&*k that I don't think it will ever get resolved to anyone's satisfaction.  

Problem #1, as I see it, is the enormous costs of liability insurance for the Docs.  A friend of mine was a cardiologist and switched to doing sleep therapy because the insurance was so much cheaper that even though his top-line gross income dropped by more than half, his bottom-line went up.  

I don't even know how to fix that.  There has to be a consequence for docs who screw up but all too often we end up with either insurance companies settling bad claims or judgements that bear no relationship to what happened.  The plaintiffs in these cases are always incredibly sympathetic so juries tend to err on the side of over-compensating them but that just drives up costs for everyone.  

Problem #1a, as I see it, is that the US effectively subsidizes R&D for the entire world.  With most medicines the unit cost to produce a given pill is negligible.  The main cost is the R&D and that has to get amortized over the life of the pill.  The problem here is that most of the rest of the developed world either has price controls (Europe) or just steals the technology (China) and the less-developed parts of the world can't afford it so the US Drug Companies have to get their R&D investment back from their US customers only.  This is a trade issue that Trump should take on.  Somehow force Pharmaceutical companies to spread those costs over the rest of the world too.  

Problem #2 is the inherent problem of medicine that none of us have an incentive to save money.  We don't know what is going on and it is our health and someone else (insurance/government) is paying for it so we just do whatever "they" say.  The problem is that sometimes "they" are just generating bills or practicing defensive medicine and a lot of what we end up agreeing to is completely unnecessary.  

Trade agreement with UK. Good start!