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A View of Healthcare Costs from the Inside
Summary of Contents
Each section now has a short video presentation to highlight the main points (a must see if you don't have time to read it all).
For a full (one hour) video click here
(Click on Each Title to Read More)
-Almost all prices in health care are hidden from both doctors and patients. Any cost that’s hidden or confusing is easy to inflate.
2. Medications: What Your Pharmacist Won’t Tell You Watch Video
-Most generic prescription medications aren’t 50% or 75% less expensive than their brand named equivalents, they are 100 times cheaper!!
-Most people can pay less for generic medications if they pay for them directly than if they use their insurance and pay a copay (people pay extra for the privilege of being overcharged).
-The Costco list is only partial but it's clear that $32.95 per year is a lot less than $10 per month!
3. Medications: The Bad News Watch Video
-When medications are expensive, they can be REALLY expensive!
-Concrete examples are given that show how hiding the cost of these medications directly results in inflating these costs
4. Medications: Conclusion Watch Video
-The tips given at the end of the section would be useful to most people
-Pharmaceutical reps should be banned.
-Most doctors have no idea how much they’re paid for what they do.
-We give insurance companies discounts to abuse us every day while private payers (the uninsured) are overcharged.
6. Diagnostic Tests Watch Video
-Most diagnostics tests and procedures are inexpensive to perform.
-The charges for these tests, however, have no relation to the actual cost (or expected reimbursement) of these tests.
-50 million people are denied access to basic healthcare in this Country, not because they can’t afford it, but because they’re not allowed to afford it.
7. Health Insurance Watch Video
-Just because you have health insurance, it doesn’t mean you’re necessarily getting a good deal on your health care.
-Concrete examples are given which show how health insurance companies can manipulate a patient’s out of pocket payments to make it appear as though health care is more expensive than it really is.
-Insurance companies sell security against financial risk. If no one really understands what that risk is (because all prices are hidden or deceptive) then the price of the security (insurance) can be grossly inflated.
8. Hospital Billing Watch Video
-Hospital Bills are, for the most part, works of complete fiction.
-Inflating the charge on every service a hospital provides has two major consequences:
a. It gives an unrealistic (inflated) impression of how much health care really costs.
b. It further allows hospitals and insurance companies to abuse people.
9. Medical Malpractice Watch Video
-My medical malpractice premiums are a trivial amount and I posted my bill to prove it!
-The cost of medical malpractice has dropped dramatically in the last decade.
10. Conclusion: Is Health Care Really so Expensive? Watch Video
-If no one really understands a problem, it’s unlikely a good solution will ever be proposed.
-My family’s health insurance premiums cost almost three times what ALL of my other insurance policies (including malpractice) COMBINED cost me (for a family of four with no medical problems).
-Providing price transparency in health care would go a long way toward lowering health care costs since the price of most health care products have gone down in the last ten years.
11. Latest News: A collection of links to recent news articles about this site and emails from people who've read it.
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