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Your Illness Is Someone Else's Business Opportunity
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Your suspicions confirmed: Americans are screwed on health care because doctors, hospitals, clinics, pharmaceutical companies charge way, way, way, way more for everything than in any other country, for care that's no better than many of them. And that's because they can. This article notes that colonoscopies are a) a fairly routine procedure done in doctor's offices or "surgery centers" that mark up the procedure for maximum profit, and b) are no better in most cases for detecting cancer than other, less invasive, cheaper procedures, yet c) doctors insist on ordering the more expensive and profitable tests. Because they can. The problem is not what proper health care costs to administer in reality, it's that the costs are jacked up to maximize profits across the board. And there's no consistency: a colonoscopy administered in Baltimore will be charged at under $2,000, but in New York, you're talking over $8.000 for the same procedure. And it's not a real free and open market; insurance coverage makes competition irrelevant, and since patients don't always know (and can't generally tell) what the underlying cost is if they don't have to pay it, they don't realize that this is the cause of their sky-high premiums. This can't continue. And Obamacare doesn't fix this. (New York Times)
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