Time Article: "Bitter Pill"

We recently started getting Time after using up Matt's airline points that were going to expire (magazines were the only thing we could get with them and there weren't many good choices, but Time is all right). This week, there was only one main "featured" article, a very long one concerning the costs of medical care.
Despite the length, it is definitely worth reading. I think everyone should know about this because if it is valid (and I don't disbelieve it), the ridiculous overpricing of medical care and supplies alone should encourage people to take action. I'm not sure what action, but something.

Here's the article. Again, it's long, but worth reading, maybe not at this moment, but sometime when you have time:

http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/

After a trip in August to the hospital for excruciating kidney stones, and a more recent visit to a doctor and an allergy specialist to try to dig into Matt's hives (five or six years after previous appointments that led to nothing and cost a ton), I could totally relate to this article and I got very incensed reading it. Matt and I hardly had to pay anything near what the people mentioned in this article did, but we still felt the costs of the tests and treatments were ridiculous. Part of it was that we has a (seemingly) high deductible on the first trip and on the second we didn't have insurance, so we had to pay pretty much the whole sum each time ... but when Matt went to the hospital, it was amazing how quickly they were ready to inject painkillers (when the pain had just started to subside, of course) which made him break out in hives worse than I've ever seen, causing them to have to shoot him up with several other drugs, trying to find the right thing to calm the hives. Every time they went to put something in him, Matt looked so unhappy. He hates taking medication of any sort if he can help it. The scan was the most expensive part. I'm not surprised when they say these expensive medical equipments can be paid for easily in a year, leaving only major profits to be made in the future.

At the allergy specialist, after a short discussion, Matt's "tests" began with the doctor scratching a broken tongue depressor down his back. In a few minutes, the scratches were really red and whelped. The doctor acted like this proved what Matt had been saying about having hives so bad. Well, duh. They were pretty extreme whelps, but I think I would have whelped up at least a little if he'd run a broken stick down my back, too. Then of course he was tested for all the common allergens, none of which he was allergic to. We were pretty sure this would be the case. Matt thinks it is more likely his hives get set off by preservatives since his grandfather has something similar happen and has to avoid things with preservatives. But the allergy doctor said that finding that out is really difficult and expensive (as if our 2-hour appointment that ended once more with "Hmm, not sure, it might go away though" [after six years of it not going away] wasn't). I wonder if the tongue depressor was secretly hidden in our costs. I wouldn't be surprised after reading the ridiculous amount of items that patients are often charged for that are supposed to be included in the overall "facility fee" ("Outpatient Bill" Section). I can understand a cost per hour for seeing the doctor and for the (tiny) amount of each liquid allergen used in the allergy test, but they certainly make a lot of money in 2 hours that day in return for not many answers. All the lab tests Matt took at the doctor's office a few weeks before also cost a lot. They all came back regular, no problems, and we are thankful for knowing that doesn't have some weird disease or deficiency ... but there is always that small regret of taking the time and money to find out that everything was fine after all (or not finding out what it is that isn't fine, in reality). No one wants money to be an object when it comes to health, and as I told Matt, since we are doing well saving up right now, I'd rather him go and have to pay the price to know what was wrong or at least that he didn't have cancer or something than worry about it ... but as the examples in this article prove, being helped back to a healthy state doesn't completely erase the worries and issues that come along with nearly all medical encounters.

I like how this article points out that whether you are for or against the Obama Health Plan, it is crucial that we realize that health insurance and providers are not the only part of the problem. There are some comments made about what consequences (good and bad) may come from "Obamacare," but more than anything the article focuses on the underlying problem of exorbitant markups on medical bills for no valid reason and the fact that these "non-profit" institutions are somehow making extreme profits. If these facts are exposed and we do something about the mark ups, I think there would be a change for the better with or without "Obamacare." It is clear that even if we change how medical bills are paid for, there will still be high costs for somebody to pay that don't necessarily need to be there.

Maybe I'll try bargaining next time we go to the hospital, if that is actually a valid possibility. In the "Nonprofit Profitmakers" section there are a few paragraphs about medical billing advocates who help patients negotiate with hospitals to lower bills, and the writer also quotes a couple of people from the medical field who say that the "chargemaster" (a list of prices each hospital has for tests, equipment, and treatments) lists prices not normally paid by most patients (but the writer brings up several cases where in fact patients did have to pay those high prices that vary from hospital to hospital). It sounds like it may be difficult but a possibility to combat ridiculous pricing by arguing against that list, if you could ask about it, especially after reading this article and realizing the real costs of supplies versus what we are charged on the bill. The comments by some of the people he talked to in the medical field were also pretty shocking in some cases.

I have read almost all the article (skimmed a bit in the middle, but looked over the end where he gives solutions as to what we must to do fix this and planning to look over it some more in the future) and I really do think it is worth reading and considering. Maybe some people will say he skews the facts a little - I don't know, I'm not in the medical field, but it's not hard for me to believe that he paints a fairly just picture of what it is really like, from nothing else than experiences in my own life and that of others that show that medical costs are unfathomable in most cases - to the point that some people would rather suffer mild (or major) discomfort than take a chance trying to pay the costs of fixing the problem. It scares me to think that even our own very small-in-comparison bills seemed costly, but looking at the examples this article cites, I can't even imagine having a serious medical issue to deal with.