You’ve just graduated. Bills are stacking up, you need food and shampoo and your internship is unpaid. Health insurance is something that can seem unnecessary. You’re healthy and you just can’t afford the extra costs right now. Until you get sick. Until an accident happens and you are forced to take a trip to the hospital. Here’s where things get dicey, where the controversy begins and where the nonprofit hospitals make their profits.<\/p>\n
Last month, “Time” published an article by Steven Brill called “Bitter Pill.” The article details the exorbitant costs of services in hospitals across the country, from the price of routine tests and scans to the price of medication. Throughout the article, Brill draws an interesting comparison of prices paid for services by Medicare and Medicaid patients and the uninsured. These people are not poor enough or old enough to qualify for government assistance with health care, but aren’t wealthy enough to afford insurance. These people fall between the cracks. They are the main source of profit for hospitals.<\/p>\n
Here are a few examples of the price discrepancy: A chest X-ray costs $283 for an uninsured patient in Texas and $20.44 for a Medicare patient. An injection of Rituximab, a cancer medication, costs an uninsured patient $13,702 and $4,000 for a Medicare patient. In addition to this, hospitals get volume discounts for drugs, meaning the cancer medicine had about a 400 percent paid-in-advance mark-up at a hospital that calls itself nonprofit.<\/p>\n
Medicare takes the nonprofit label on hospitals seriously. The prices quoted above for Medicare patients take the price of the service into account, along with allocated expenses for overhead costs, capital expenses, salaries, insurance and differences in cost of living. We should all be paying those prices.<\/p>\n
Hospitals have turned what is supposed to be a service into a business. Between 1998 and 2012, the health care industry spent $5.36 billion on lobbying (compared to $1.53 billion spent by defense lobbies), meaning they have substantial interest in government and making sure they can keep getting away with their bullying.<\/p>\n
Hospital CEOs should not be pulling in million dollar paychecks and benefiting from the corrupt system that preys on unsuspecting Americans. Sixty percent of filed bankruptcies in the U.S. are the result of health care-related expenses; the price of health care is breaking the bank for both the uninsured and insured. This number of bankruptcies is unsurprising seeing as national health expenditures have expanded to nearly five times as much as GDP since 1960.<\/p>\n
Moral of the story: The debate over the Affordable Care Act began a nationwide conversation about health care. People get riled up about the flaws in social health care programs and ask who is fitting the bill. We skipped, and continued to ignore, the question of why are the bills so expensive to begin with? Real change in the health care system starts with legislators asking this question and working to figure out a solution. We don’t necessarily need the single-payer system as seen in European nations. We need to establish taxes and regulations for the health care industry to ensure that the hospitals are truly nonprofit, serving the people instead of their pocketbooks.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Look for a continuation of this topic in the next issue of the Bison. <\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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