"On April 3, Nina Dang, 24, found herself in a position like so many San Francisco bike riders — on the pavement with a broken arm.
A bystander saw her fall and called an ambulance. She was semi-lucid for that ride, awake but unable to answer basic questions about where she lived. Paramedics took her to the emergency room at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, where doctors X-rayed her arm and took a CT scan of her brain and spine. She left with her arm in a splint, on pain medication, and with a recommendation to follow up with an orthopedist.
A few months later, Dang got a bill for $24,074.50. Premera Blue Cross, her health insurer, would only cover $3,830.79 of that — an amount that it thought was fair for the services provided. That left Dang with $20,243.71 to pay, which the hospital threatened to send to collections in mid-December..."
Sarah Kliff, A $20,243 bike crash: Zuckerberg hospital’s aggressive tactics leave patients with big bills
"Monopolies hurt the public and the republic alike; the job of policing that power must be taken seriously."
Elizabeth Warren
“I can strongly recommend Jonathan Tepper’s The Myth of Capitalism, opening our minds to see the steep decline in competition in America in recent years and the growing concentration of economic power in fewer and fewer hands, in oligarchies with similarities to those in Russia and China.”
Dr. Harald Malmgren
Within so many of the corporate dominant monopolies like Healthcare, Banking, Pharmaceuticals, some companies seem to be free to do just about whatever they can get away with. Do we really need more examples of this at this late date?
Healthcare in the US is bordering on insane when it comes to billing practises and the lack of practical recourse or common sense, with Big Pharma running a close second. But the Banks are not all that far behind, and despite some setbacks after the last financial crisis seem to be regaining ground.
I have met many, many dedicated professionals in the healthcare industry. But like most participants they are just being swept along because they have little practical recourse or power. To speak up is to be punished, and severely.
And others just view it as the rules of the game, orders from above, and go about their jobs with dispassionate detachment.
For the most part what we are talking about here does not involve individual doctors and their family practices. These tend to be fairly straightforward. And it seems like a dying breed.
What we are talking about here is the monopoly healthcare complex, in which large corporations buy up hospitals and groups of specialist physicians' practices and form massive organizations with significant economic and political power.
The opportunity for abuse in such situations is a fact of human nature despite the Utopian fantasies which some adhere to about perfect competition without rules and regulations. The result is not a balanced market economy, but oligarchies and monopolies.
A simple law that states that when a patient is brought into a hospital emergency room for treatment, their private insurance and the treatments must be provided at the network rates in their insurance policy, or at the prevailing rate for a Medicare patient, whichever is lower. And any uncollectible services to be written off or compensated by government will be done at the Medicare rate and not at some fictionalized billing statement that is part of a negotiating game between corporate monopolies.
I believe that New York State has a law requiring ER Hospitals and doctors to accept private insurance for patients as if they are in-network. This includes those 'consultations' which happen during a hospital stay by doctors who accept no insurance and who charge whatever they feel that they can get away with charging for some service, of which provider or price the patient is never informed beforehand.
Those prices are quite often ten times the going rate, based on the principle that the reimbursement by the insurance company will be about ten percent of the charge. But you can see what happens when the hospital and insurance company don't come together as in the case above.
There are plenty of phony explanations and just plain falsehoods wrapped around this, the two prevailing that hospitals charge 10x what they expect to get, or the high prices are just there for 'gold plated' plans carried by executives.
As the story above shows, this is just not true. The abuses are there and they catch real people and turn them into statistics, every day.
This is no way to run a healthcare system. It is not, and no other major country does it this way.
The real solution is most likely some form of universal healthcare system, which has been implemented for years by every major developed nation but the US. There is room for improvement as I have suggested above. This exists now to some extent in the medical devices and ancillary services, whereing pricing has been brought more into line by Medicare and other regulation. But it is just scratching at the surface.
Here is another example of why our prescription drugs cost so much. Trump said he was going to change this and allow the government to negotiate drug prices. What has happened to that?
This will not happen for the same reason that we are seeing no movement towards meaningful reform in Pharma or Banking. And you know exactly why, unless you have been living in a bubble or are willfully blinded by greed.
You may not think that this applies to you, or that this is not true. But some day you might stumble into the hard truth of how things really are, suddenly become a statistic, and then you will know. I sincerely hope that you do not.
I would also like to make it clear that Mark Zuckerberg does not own this hospital, or run it in any way to my knowledge. His name is associated with it because he gave them a $75 million donation, which is what billionaires do. They make huge donations to hospitals and universities to have their names attached to them. But it is not fair at all to judge him for their actions.
Stocks managed to extend their rally today despite some setbacks.
We will see what Trumpolini has to say about our 'crisis' at the southern border this evening, and the trade war, and probably whatever else crosses his mind. My only certainly is that it will not involve any meaningful reform in healthcare, finance, insurance, or pharmaceuticals.
Have a pleasant evening.
