A $1000 for a toothbrush?

[Whisp]

over a $100 for one Tylenol?
This is from a report I just heard on CNN of what some hospitals charge!

W•T•F?!
and the claim is insurance companies pay for this because they are 'too busy' to look at all the details!

Can insurance companies OWN hospitals? Cuz thats the only thing I can surmise from this robbery. In the end the taxpayers foot the bill.

cripes on a cracker!

[OneTenthofOnePercent]

1. I believe the hospitals do this to offset the cost the uninsured they are forced to treat.

The money to treat the ininsured has to come from somewhere... even if it's only shitty ER care.
In a way, everyone with insurance already pays for everyone without insurance.

If insurance will pay exorbant fees for care, hospitals will charge it.
The patients don't care cause they don't (directly) foot the bill.

[Donnachaidh]

11. and do they base their costs of dealing with the uninsured using the SAME figures?

You know, I *don't* buy this argument totally, because hospitals don't release actual figures of percentages of how many paying customers they have versus uninsured.. Using the *uninsured* as an excuse to pull some flagrantly huge price for a couple of tylenol just smacks of bullshit.

One Hundred dollars for a toothbrush is fucking OBSCENE - whether they treat uninsured or not.

It's a convenient excuse when you've historically looked at people's insurance paperwork as keys to the vault. BOTH the medical community AND the insurance companies are complicit in sticking it to the consumer.

[ConstitutionalLib]

31. The main reason that stuff like this happens

is that the people consuming health care do not pay for it. This entire third party payer system is the root of all evil. It drives costs up, while masking the true costs, and removing from any oversight the re imbursement models.

How wonderful would it be if YOU owned your health insurance like you do you homeowners or car insurance. You could take it with you from employer to employer with no gap in coverage. Better still if doctors and hospitals had to be transparent with their pricing, and could post prices of routine services, so consumers could shop for the level of service they wwanted, and were willing to pay for. And no mandated coverages, or blackout areas.

This means that if you want a lower premium and are comfortable paying for your office visits, in return for getting only the coverages you want, you can do so. Also if a company in CA. offers better rates than a Company in MA. you can buy it.

You would see costs drop dramatically.

[elehhhhna]

32. and what utopian health insurance company would ever offer thisplan?

Great idea, except for the across state lines baloney.

[ConstitutionalLib]

37. what is wrong with that?

[ConstitutionalLib]

40. there companies that offer

only catastrophic plans, the problem is that states dictate what MUST be included in health insurance, and when you include basic stuff like office visits, it drives up the cost of insurance. Think how much your car insurance would be if it included oil changes and tune ups.

Also, the other problem is that your employer is buying your health insurance not you. Your employer is trying to balance coverage vs. cost for a one size fits all plan for the company, they do not know what your family needs or wants.

And lastly your company is probably paying 90% of the premium if you have on of those plans with $10 or $20 office visits, and $20 prescriptions.

[Donnachaidh]

33. sorry -- not buying the *costs would drop dramatically* - and here's why

I worked for some time in a medical parts facility. We were making the silicon tips used in cataract surgery. We were paid slightly above minimum wage, and each of us were REQUIRED tp push out 1800 parts PER HOUR. That's Eighteen HUNDRED parts per hour. Do the math for an eight hour day, and you'll see that each person was cranking out hundreds of thousands.

Those little parts cost about a penny a piece, in actual materials. They would ship to the company that ordered them, who would then send them off to clients.

Six months after I left that job, I had a chance to see a bill a friend was sent after having ONE cataract removed. The eye tip was listed.

The price was SEVENTY FIVE DOLLARS for a pair of tips. TWO of them. The bill was from the hospital.

So in one hour I was cranking out a future profit of $67,500 for hospitals, on parts that they may have purchased for a FRACTION of what they probably paid?

You don't think there is something obscenely WRONG with the billing practices? Even *with* factoring in the uninsured -- hospital charges are OBSCENE -- and nowhere near justified.

[Whisp]

34. isn't price gouging illegal?

silly me, it's only if you are scalping concert tickets.

[Donnachaidh]

35. we've done NOTHING to address price-gouging AND price fixing by both

the insurance industry AND the medical Community. BOTH do it. Both get highly offended when it's pointed out. But it's done.

[ConstitutionalLib]

38. Do you KNOW what

that hospitals costs ACTUALLY are? or are you just assuming that they are making obscene profits? Because according to both Morningstar and ValueLine the average private hospital that even makes a profit only averages 2% profit. If those charges were all profit, that margin should be something on the order of 1000% I would think. By the way, 67% of hospitals make no profit at all.

[Hello_Kitty]

17. That's wrong.

Uncompensated care represents only 2.7% of total health care expenditures and the government picks up the lion's share of the tab for the uninsured. Furthermore, uninsured people use half as much health care, on average, as people with coverage ($1200 per year vs. $2400). The meme that the uninsured are responsible for health care costs not only provides people with a convenient scapegoat but it also gives them a false belief that simply forcing people to purchase insurance will solve the problem of our broken system.

http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/reprint/hlthaff.w3.66v1.pdf

[heli]

2. The $600 toilet seat Reagan bought is no comparison to the current outrage

that we have for a heath care system.

[ThomWV]

4. Royal thrones for royal turds

[d.gibbs]

5. and the $435 claw hammer!

[muntrv]

3. It better be one of those gold toothbrushes in "Coming To America."

As in Akeem's toothbrush.

[notadmblnd]

6. I was given a lecture years ago when I had my son.

I took my own over the counter tylenol to the hospital and took it. It pissed the nurse off for some reason.

[Dappleganger]

21. They don't like that at all...

but I have done the same many times. They just need to know so you won't have drug-interactions.

[notadmblnd]

24. I wasn't on any drugs, I just had a baby I took Tylenol for pain after

I don;t know if I'm unusual or not, but giving birth was an easy thing for me. I was ready to go home about an hour later (they wouldn't let me). I took the Tylenol for the episiotomy(sp?) pain, that was the worst part.

[zipplewrath]

7. Probably poor reporting

I suspect, based mostly upon my own experience with hospitals, that although it appears on bills, the vast majority of insurance companies have an amount they will pay for a hospital stay, and what is on the itemized bill has little to do with it. The problem of course is that some folks would end up paying these costs. If you ever find yourself paying "retail" for hospital service (or any medical service), sit down with the administrator or other representative and "negotiate". You might be amazed how much the bill can be reduced with little if any negotiating skills. There is all this kind of crap, plus merely asking how much the largest insurance company pays for similar procedures might expose huge savings. A friend of mine went through this process (it takes a couple of visits) and the bill ended up being 60% less than the "retail" price.

[BeFree]

9. Yeah

This is why we need government totally involved in the economic decisions about health care. We can't wait any longer, there must be oversight of all facets.

[Wildewolfe]

10. that's still at a 60% savings...

a 400 dollar toothbrush and a 40 dollar tylenol.

Yes they do raise the prices on the uninsured (retail price as you call it)... but those two are egregious examples.

[Dappleganger]

8. When we had our first child, I remember looking the bill and seeing diapers for $28.

I picked up the phone and bitched at the hospital and they reduced the charge. After that we always brought our own diapers but made sure they didn't charge us for the pricey ones they had (and they were the same thing!).

Hospital stuff is worse than the mini-bar at a motel.

[Whisp]

16. it's really sad where you have to be on guard for every bloody thing...

and can't have some kind of assurance of basic fairness.

read your labels, check online about the drugs you take, laws are different state to state, bank rates are high but if you 'negotiate' you might get a better deal. etc etc.

So much time has to be invested so you get ripped off the least you can be.

:(

[Dappleganger]

19. OK, this may seem strange...

but I've had multiple surgeries (a few major) plus rad and chemo, and whenever we went I got the person with me to count IV bags and meds given to me in a notebook. There many times that the count was off, they only used part of a bag and then would begin a whole new one within the same hour! Yes, I bitched at the hospital for it but they would bill you for every little thing and then I believe they padded their billing to the insurance company. Unfortunately you can't do that in the OR as well, but my mom was a nurse and told me that if they open up something and don't use it that the insurance company is still charged! We had problems with this at two different hospitals. Only Mayo in Jax seemed to be more honest with their charges.

[butterfly77]

12. Just like contrators..

charging $300 for a screwdriver...

[KitSileya]

13. That's ridiculous.

I remember having my eyes opened by the scene in one West Wing episode where the former submarine officer shows Donna why they have $300 ashtrays(?), but in an ordinary hospital?! Unless that toothbrush was attached to a dentist's chair, I cannot see how it could cost that much.

[dysfunctional press]

14. insurance companies don't pay the full rate at hospitals.

they have negotiated rates that are much less than what an uninsured patient will be billed.
how do they do it...?
volume. volume. VOLUME.

so- the hospitals jack up the rates, so that what the insurance company actually pays for something is more in line with what that something actually costs the hospital to deliver/perform.


the people who get screwed are the non-indigent people without insurance- they get billed, and are expected to pay, the inflated 'full price' that insurance companies get a discount off of.

is this a great country, or what...?

[Hello_Kitty]

20. And then they get blamed for the high cost of insurance premiums.

Which has NOTHING to do with them. I no longer believe the claim that the uninsured add 8% or $100 a month to the average premium. People cite that all the time but no one explains exactly what it's based on. According to this report: http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/reprint/hlthaff.w3.66v1.pdf uncompensated care is only 2.8% of all health care expenditures.

[unblock]

15. this is the free market at work, so the prices must be optimal. what's the problem?

:sarcasm:

[Warpy]

18. Military pricing, maybe

We didn't levy charges for things like toothbrushes and sample tubes of toothpaste, they were just charged as an admission kit along with the basin, tissues, denture cup, and whatever else the patient needed.

While I can see jacking up the price of a Tylenol, knowing all the checks and counter checks it goes through on the way to the patient and the assessment that must be done after the patient takes it (it's quite a different thing giving it to someone who's medically unstable rather than taking one at home), there is no excuse for overcharging for a damned toothbrush.

It can take 5 people to give someone a Tylenol in the hospital and record what it does or doesn't do.

[marew]

22. You can get 3 at Dollar Tree for a buck!

I heard reported on the news a while back that 20% of premiums go to pay for the uninsured. So for the idiots who say they don't want to pay for others' health care, they are doing it already. By the way, my significant other spoke to close friends in Canada the other day. Their grandchild was born with serious birth defects and was quickly transported to an American hospital. The Canadian government is paying for all of the treatment, transportation, everything. For all the bad things said about the Canadian health plan, especially by Republicans, they have a lot of very happy people there also.

[Romulox]

23. One thing is clear: a government mandate to buy that toothbrush must surely lower its price!

It's irrefutable!

[Hello_Kitty]

27. Yeah, it's those deadbeats refusing to buy the $1000 toothbrush who are the problem. eom

[kiapolo]

25. I get these whenever I go to Emergency Room visits...

I live in Hawaii, and my wife has great health care through her employer (I'm a contract worker, and therefore non-employee who does not benefit from Hawaii's employer insurance option).

When ever my wife or I go to the emergency room, I refuse to allow the nurses or doctors to give either of us medicine, I tell them to write the prescription and I'll get it from the 24 hour pharmacy in the building, and administer it myself (or have my wife do it herself). Last time I allowed them to give my wife some Tylenol with codeine they charged us $50 for the pills and $75 to "administer" the pills to my wife!!!! Never again!

[Whisp]

26. some great advice in this thread.

Hope it helps someone who wasn't aware of this.

[jmowreader]

28. Do hospitals actually get paid this? Or is it just what they charge?

By the time the beancounters who run the insurance companies browbeat the hospitals down to an "acceptable" amount, the hospital probably collects $2 for a dose of Tylenol. That dose has to go through the hospital's receiving system, has to be accounted for like all the other drugs, uses the same dispensing procedure as all the other drugs (in a hospital ALL drugs are prescription drugs) and so on and so forth, so a couple bucks for a drug you can get in a 100-count bottle for $5 isn't really outrageous.

[kiapolo]

29. If it is emergency, they it's not the hospitals that paid...it's the Doctors!!!!

nearly all emergency rooms are run by contractors, and most Dr's in emergency rooms are independent contractors. If you've gone to the emergency room, you'll notice you get a bill from the Hospital, then one from every dr. that saw you (specialist, anesthesiologist, etc). Each Doctor is charging you for their independent services. This is generally where the most egregious charges come from (the Tylenol, the "administration fees." etc....

[jmowreader]

30. That makes sense

Last time I went to the emergency room in the civilian world I was ten--and the healthcare industry was far different 36 years ago. (Got hit by a log skidder.)

These days, I've got VA healthcare; I go in, show my card and get the care I need...or so they say since I'm now bulletproof.

[liberal N proud]

36. I don't think tort reform will bring down those costs

What does the GOP have to say about this?

[AlinPA]

39. That report had great material, but the horrible reporting by that bug-eyed, screaming twit on CNN

drove my wife and I away from CNN for another month. The reporter's facial expressions and hysterical shouting was totally unprofessional. For the first time in a month, we watched CNN for 15 minutes and caught that piece.