Time: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us (hospital, doctor, patient)
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OUTSTANDING reporting by Steven Brill - cover story for this week's Time:
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I got the idea for this article when I was visiting Rice University last year. As I was leaving the campus, which is just outside the central business district of Houston, I noticed a group of glass skyscrapers about a mile away lighting up the evening sky. The scene looked like Dubai. I was looking at the Texas Medical Center, a nearly 1,300-acre, 280-building complex of hospitals and related medical facilities, of which MD Anderson is the lead brand name.
Medicine had obviously become a huge business. In fact, of Houston’s top 10 employers, five are hospitals, including MD Anderson with 19,000 employees; three, led by ExxonMobil with 14,000 employees, are energy companies.
How did that happen, I wondered. Where’s all that money coming from? And where is it going?
I have spent the past seven months trying to find out by analyzing a variety of bills from hospitals like MD Anderson, doctors, drug companies and every other player in the American health care ecosystem.
When you look behind the bills that Sean Recchi and other patients receive, you see nothing rational — no rhyme or reason — about the costs they faced in a marketplace they enter through no choice of their own.
The only constant is the sticker shock for the patients who are asked to pay.
Clearly you didn't read the article. Guess investing a couple of hours of your time to educate yourself on the facts isn't worth it to you. You'd rather make uninformed comments, instead.
I have never seen the government charge a bill as exorbitant as those the couple in that article facing.
There are numerous horror stories in that article. The whole business of medical bills and expenses is a shell game, soaking the most vulnerable. Insurance companies and Medicare have clout, the individual is out in the cold.
I asserted that government is our most exhorbitant expense. You challenged it. I refuted it and stand by my assertion. Hospitals write off billions in bad debt every year. The government has run up a $17,000,000,000,000 debt and it is still climbing.
I asserted that government is our most exhorbitant expense. You challenged it. I refuted it and stand by my assertion. Hospitals write off billions in bad debt every year. The government has run up a $17,000,000,000,000 debt and it is still climbing.
I stand by my post.
I agree 100%. We need to limit the government, not expand it.
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