You Are Being Raped And Pillaged By The Healthcare Industry
The problem is the prices (and profits)
Opaque and sky high bills are breaking Americans — and our health care system.
On September 28, 2016, a 3-year-old girl named Elodie Fowler slid into an MRI machine at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto, California. Doctors wanted to better understand a rare genetic condition that was causing swelling along the right side of her body and problems processing regular food.
The scan took about 30 minutes. The hospital’s doctors used the results to start Elodie on an experimental new drug regimen.
Fowler’s parents knew the scan might cost them a few thousand dollars, based on their research into typical pediatric MRI scans. Even though they had one of the most generous Obamacare exchange plans available in California, they decided to go out of network to a clinic that specialized in their daughter’s rare genetic condition. That meant their plan would cover half of a “fair price” MRI.
They were shocked a few months later when a bill arrived with a startling price tag: $25,000. The bill included $4,016 for the anesthesia, $2,703 for a recovery room, and $16,632 for the scan itself plus doctor fees. The insurance picked up only $1,547.23, leaving the family responsible for the difference: $23,795.47.
“I honestly thought it was a mistake,” Elodie’s mother, Annie Nilsson, says of receiving the bill. “There is no possible way anyone could be charged that much for one scan that took 30 minutes.”
Nilsson’s instinct — that these scans should cost a couple thousand dollars — was right. The cost of the same image at other California hospitals is significantly lower. And there was a huge gulf between what the insurance company thought was a “fair price” and what the hospital thought was a “fair price.”
Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto, CA billed a family $25,000 for an MRI scan
Johnny Harris/Vox
“Elodie has had CT scans, colonoscopies, lots of ultrasounds, so we had assumed the price would be roughly the same,” Nilsson says. “We broadly researched what an MRI should cost, and we thought it would be a couple of thousand dollars. Nowhere in our long back-and-forth with the hospital was there any hint from the people scheduling it that we could possibly see a price like this.”
In a statement, Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital defended the charges.
“Even services that seem routine, like MRIs, can vary dramatically in cost when those services are being provided to sick children,” the statement read. “To make sure we provide the best possible experience and care to our patients, Stanford Children’s employs highly-trained specialists in pediatric imaging.”
It continued: “While we cannot speak to what technology other California children’s hospitals employ or their costs, we know that costs can also vary regionally based on local market demands for labor, supplies, real estate and other essential components of health care delivery. All of these factors impact our pricing, and underlie the amounts we charge for the care we provide.”
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Nilsson negotiated the bill down to $16,000, which she now pays in monthly $700 installments. This has made the family budget tight; they already pay $800 each month for a special food formula that Elodie eats, which the insurance plan doesn’t cover at all.
“Every month, I hope they’ll maybe take pity and not send the bill, but of course they do,” Nilsson says. “Sometimes I’m late paying. My biggest issue is, how could the insurance say a fair price is $1,000 and the hospital say $25,000? How could there possibly be such a gap between those?”
Health care prices in America are high — and they are secret
Elodie’s story is common. Americans pay exorbitant prices for all kinds of care. As a health care reporter, I find myself writing about $25,000 MRIs, $629 Band-Aids — even a $39.95 fee just to hold one’s own baby after delivery. People send me these types of bills quite regularly via email.
The health care prices in the United States are, in a word, outlandish. On average, an MRI in the United States costs $1,119. That same scan costs $503 in Switzerland and $215 in Australia.
These are uniquely American stories, and they are the key to understanding our dysfunctional health care system. High prices are hurting American families. Most Americans who get insurance at work now have a deductible over $1,000. High prices are why medical debt remains a leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States, and nowhere else.
As Elodie’s case shows, health care prices in the United States are both high and unpredictable. We rarely know what our bill will be when we enter a doctor’s office, or even when we leave. The prices aren’t listed on the wall or a website as they would be in most other places where consumers spend money.
Today, I am launching a project inspired by these reader emails. My colleagues and I at Vox are asking readers to submit hospital bills through our secure system so we can start getting a nationwide picture of one particular hospital fee, called an emergency facility fee. The reason we’ve selected this fee is because nearly all hospitals charge one for seeking emergency room care, but the price varies enormously and is typically kept secret.
We plan to report back on our findings both here at Vox and in my new podcast, The Impact, a reported series that explores the big challenges in American health care through the lives of people who experience it. If you’d like to participate, there are more details for you here.
As that project launches, I wanted to spell out why these prices are such a problem for the American health care system. Obamacare didn’t tackle America’s high health care prices; neither did the Republican plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Our health care prices explain why reform efforts continue to vex each political party. When you’re paying the highest prices in the world for basic services, for scans and drugs, it will undoubtedly be a struggle to provide all citizens with health care.
This is true for a Republican plan to replace the Affordable Care Act — and a plan backed by 17 Democrats to create a single-payer health care system. The problem is the prices — but right now, there is little political will to fix it.
“It’s the prices, stupid”
In 2003, a team of influential economists published a paper pointing out that prices are the key problem in American health care. It came with the title: “It’s the Prices, Stupid.”
The takeaway was absolutely clear. “Higher health spending but lower use of health services adds up to much higher prices in the United States than in any other OECD country,” the paper concluded.
Johns Hopkins’s Gerard Anderson was the lead author of that report. I called him a few weeks ago to ask if he thought the conclusions of his 14-year-old report still stood.
“The Affordable Care Act reduced the price to consumers, but it didn’t reduce the actual, unit price,” says Anderson. “It essentially made everything affordable to people, but the prices actually accelerated in growth post-ACA.”
But this is not always the story told about American health care. Instead, it often goes like this: We are going to the doctor way too much, and that makes our system expensive. Rampant overuse, unnecessary care, and waste are at the heart of our spending problem.
One poll of 627 doctors, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that 42 percent of physicians thought their own patients were receiving too much medical care. “You’re getting too much health care,” a headline in the Atlantic bluntly declared.
In this narrative, American health care is outlandishly expensive because we take advantage of every new scan, drug, or treatment.
Intuitively, this theory makes a lot of sense to me or to anyone who has become a regular consumer of health care. I’ve had a doctor order an MRI to look at an ongoing issue in my foot, only to forget about the scan completely until I reminded him it existed and asked him to review the results.
But when you start to dive into the actual data, there is scant evidence to back up this theory. If anything, it actually turns out that we go to the doctor relatively infrequently.
Data from the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund shows that on average, Americans go to the doctor four times each year.
Dutch people go to the doctor, on average, eight times each year. Germans make 9.9 annual doctor trips. Japanese residents clock in an impressive 12.8 doctor visits each year — more than three times the frequency of their American counterparts.
“This is really counterintuitive,” says Robin Osborn, who directs the Commonwealth Fund’s international health policy program. “With all the specialists and everything, you’d think we use twice as much health care as everyone. But it’s actually just not the case.”
When Americans do go to the doctor, we tend to have less face time or interaction with our providers. The average hospital stay, for example, is 5.4 days in the United States. This puts us roughly in line with New Zealand and Norway (5.2- and 5.8-day averages, respectively) and with much shorter stays than Canadians (7.5 days) or Germans (7.8 days).
The real culprit in the United States is not that we go to the doctor too much. The culprit is that whenever we do go to the doctor, we pay an extraordinary amount.
“It just feels really crazy”
One way you see hospitals flexing this muscle quite clearly is when you look at a common charge: an emergency room facility fee. I recently produced an episode of my new podcast, The Impact, devoted to this specific health care fee — and you can listen to it here.
This is the price that most hospitals charge for using any sort of service in the emergency room, a base fee for seeing a provider. Hospitals argue that these fees are the cost of keeping their lights on and doors open 24 hours each day, seven days a week.
“We have to prepare for the sickest of the sick,” says Ryan Stanton, an emergency room doctor in Lexington, Kentucky, and a spokesperson for the American College of Emergency Physicians. “So if you come in with a stubbed toe, I still have to be prepared and staffed for the acute heart attack or the gunshot wound, or whatever is coming in.”
Some level of fee to cover these operating costs seems reasonable. But one thing I’ve learned looking at emergency room facility fees is they seem to be set with little rhyme or reason, reflecting American hospitals’ ability to essentially pick their prices.
Take, for the example, a bill I was sent last year: a $629 fee charged for an emergency room visit where a Band-Aid was placed on a 1-year-old’s finger. The bill included a $7 fee for the Band-Aid — and a $622 facility fee.
“I see both sides,” says Renee Hsia, a professor at University of California San Francisco who studies emergency billing and helped me analyze that bill. “I think there are going to be facility charges regardless of the actual service that will always be part of ER care. But where this father has a reasonable point is that when you look at the cost of the Band-Aid and the proportional overhead, it just feels really crazy.”
A few weeks ago, I asked listeners of my roundtable podcast, The Weeds, to send me facility charges they’ve received. The bills range from a low of $533 to a high of $3,170, the facility fee Erika Siegel was charged after a visit to the emergency room at San Francisco General Hospital.
She estimates she spent less than a half hour there, after she flew over her handlebars in a bad bike accident. Her wedding ring had smashed her finger, leaving it badly bruised.
“I mean, what on earth could possibly have cost them $3,170?” Siegel says. “I was so shocked.”
She tried to call up the billing department to get an explanation.
“The guy on the phone said, ‘Well, you know, that information is designated by people who have degrees in medical billing,’” she recounted. “He asked, ‘Do you have a degree in medical billing?’ I was like, ‘Well, you got me there, I sure don’t.’”
Erika Siegel’s $4,338.20 bill for an emergency room visit, including a $3,170 facility fee charge.
Courtesy of Erika Seigel
Siegel wasn’t thinking about a facility fee when she went to the emergency room. She had a smashed finger that looked bruised, and a police officer directed her to go to the emergency room.
Two things stand out in Siegel’s story and in many others — the first being that the bills are incredibly high. The cheapest option I’ve seen so far, $533, would still put a strain on many family budgets.
Second, they are all over the place. Emergency rooms don’t make these fees public, so it’s difficult to predict what you might have to pay.
This is why we’re launching our project at Vox to track these fees nationwide. To understand what’s going wrong in the American health care system, we first need to know what’s happening.
What about Obamacare?
The Affordable Care Act did many things. It extended coverage to millions of Americans and created a more equitable health insurance market that treated healthy and sick patients equally.
But that law did not tackle the unit price of health care in the United States.
“The ACA didn’t change the trajectory at all,” Hopkins’ Anderson put it bluntly.
The ACA made health care more affordable in the sense that more Americans have someone else (Medicaid or a private insurance company) paying the majority of those medical bills.
But the medical bills themselves didn’t actually shrink — and that will vex any effort at reducing the cost of American health care going forward.
Building a single-payer system in the United States, for example, would be a massively more expensive endeavor than anywhere else in the world because of our high prices. When you pay exceptionally high prices for each health service, it quite obviously becomes a lot harder to provide those services to all citizens.
Anderson argues there is little constituency for lower prices in the United States.
“We all say we want lower prices, but we’re not willing to give up anything to get them,” he says. “If you are a major corporation, let’s say General Electric, you want price controls except for the MRI machines you build. If you’re a labor union, you want to control health care prices, except for the salaries of your health care workers. And if you’re a patient, you want lower prices except when you’re sick — in which case, you want everything possible done for you.”
Health care prices are unlikely to fall without some level of government intervention. They may be nudged a little with transparency; Elodie’s family says they almost certainly would have had their daughter’s scan elsewhere if they knew it would cost as much as it did at Packard.
But the cheapest price I could find at a children’s hospital for her scans was still $7,758 — and that’s before additional charges for anesthesia, recovery, and lab work. But only 37 percent of Americans say they have enough savings to cover a surprise $500 to $1,000 medical bill.
President Trump initially showed some interest in regulating health care prices, particularly in allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, but so far he has not followed through.
Republicans ultimately put together bills that would reduce government spending on health care but not reduce prices. Instead, it would just shift a greater share of those prices onto patients (the opposite of the Affordable Care Act, which shifted the burden for high prices more to the government).
Our health care legislation in the United States focuses on the question of who pays for health care. In order to have real progress, however, we’re going to tackle a new question: How much do we pay? Until we do, we’re likely to continue living in a world of $25,000 MRIs and $629 Band-Aids that families struggle to pay for.
Help us report on the costs to visit the emergency room. Share your bill here.
http://truecostofhealthcare.org/
Conclusion: How did we get here and why
is this so hard to fix?
http://truecostofhealthcare.org/
My goal for this website was to try to untangle and explain a system that has an enormous financial impact on everyone, but makes almost no sense to anyone. It’s a system with hidden costs, enormous mark ups to discourage direct payment and a labyrinth of billing and reimbursement schedules that almost guarantees that no person directly involved would likely understand it. So, why is our health care system such a mess?
Five years ago, when I began my attempt to answer that question, the information I had was very limited. I had my own office finances and the bills and receipts my patients brought me, but not much more. Five years later I’ve broadened the scope of my research considerably to include overviews of the finances of nearly all of the various industries in health care. This research has provided answers to many of the questions I was asking then, but has also uncovered answers to questions I never would have imagined to ask when I began my research.
My website contains an enormous amount of information now. It would take several days for most people to sift through it. So what conclusions can be drawn from all of this information? Perhaps the best way to sum it all up is to answer three basic questions about our health care system:
1. How did we in the US end up with the most expensive and inefficient health care system in the developed world?
2. Where is all of the money going?
3. And, why is it so difficult to reform our health care system?
First, How did we get here?
The evolution of our health care system is a somewhat complicated story that involves several unrelated factors and, probably, a few accidents.
The push for universal health care in the US began more than a century ago. In 1912 Theodore Roosevelt was trying to retake the Presidency as an independent candidate. He was running as a progressive so he had a number of progressive reforms in his campaign platform including a national health insurance program. Roosevelt lost that election and it was decades before the idea of national health insurance again became a political issue.
A major problem with Roosevelt’s national health insurance plan was that he was way ahead of his time with the idea. Prior to the 1920’s health care was rather inexpensive because most of what it had to offer didn’t really work. So the idea of everyone having insurance to cover products that were largely inexpensive and ineffective seemed a bit silly.
By the 1920s, though, scientific advancements really started to have an impact on health care. For the first time, doctors could offer remedies that really were better than snake oil and hospitals became more than just places where poor people went to die. The problem was that most of these effective remedies, as well as hospitalizations, were quite costly so very few people were willing to pay for them unless they were critically ill.
This was a problem for both doctors and patients. Patients often wouldn’t seek out legitimate medical treatment until they were so sick it was too late to help them, and doctors and hospitals were getting less business because only the rich and the deathly ill were seeking them out.
In 1929 Baylor University in Dallas, Texas came up with a solution to this problem. For just 50¢ a month, people could buy insurance that would cover their hospitalizations should they get sick. They called this insurance “Blue Cross.” This was the birth of modern health insurance in the US.
It took a while for private health insurance to catch on in the United States because the Great Depression hit very shortly after Baylor started their program. During the Depression most people could barely afford food, so things like health insurance weren’t a priority for them.
World War II changed all of that for a very unanticipated reason: employers started buying health insurance for their employees. There were two reasons employer sponsored health insurance became popular during World War II. First, there was a wage freeze during the war so employers couldn’t compete for good employees by offering them more money. In place of offering increased wages, employers started offering free health insurance as a benefit to attract good employees.
Then, in 1943 the Internal Revenue Service cemented the concept of employer sponsored health insurance in the US by ruling that it should be tax free. With that ruling health insurance benefits became an expectation of all employers because it was less expensive for employers to purchase health insurance for employees than for the employees to buy it themselves.
Business for the health insurance companies exploded after that.
By the end of World War II, health insurance companies had grown large enough to have powerful lobbies. Harry Truman discovered this the hard way in 1945 when he proposed a nationalized health insurance program similar to the one that was being implemented in the UK.
Private health insurance companies saw this proposal as a threat to their blossoming business, so they joined with the American Medical Association (AMA) in a campaign to defeat Truman’s plan in Congress. They attacked the bill by running a national campaign accusing Truman of trying to make the US a communist nation by giving us a communist health care plan.
The campaign worked so well that the bill was killed and the Democrats suffered a huge defeat in the 1946 mid-term elections. Truman recovered somewhat in the 1948 election, but he had learned his lesson: don’t mess with the health insurance companies. Health care costs were only about five percent of our GDP at the time and only about half of the US population had private health insurance but, even then, the insurance companies were big enough to take on the President and win.
By the 1960’s, 70 percent of working Americans had some form of private health insurance that was mostly provided by their employers. In 1962, John F. Kennedy attempted to broaden health insurance coverage to cover those who couldn’t get private coverage. This time, rather than go after the business of the private insurance companies, Kennedy decided to only address the people private insurance companies didn’t want to cover: the elderly, the disabled and the poor.
You would think that health insurance companies wouldn’t be bothered if the government provided a service they had no interest in providing, but that’s not the way it worked out. The health insurance companies perceived any competition by the government as a direct threat to their business, so they again partnered with the AMA to defeat Kennedy’s bill. This time they hired a famous B movie actor to help in their campaign. Ronald Reagan gave speeches throughout the US in 1962 warning Americans that this “Medicare” bill would be the first step toward socialism and would eventually rob us of all of our freedom.
Again, the campaign worked and Medicare was killed in 1962 only to be revived by Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Johnson had the largest supermajority of Democrats any President has had since 1937. In 1965 Johnson had 68 Democrats in the Senate and 295 Democrats in the House. Johnson was also rather famous in his ability to “convince” unwilling Democrats to go along with his plans, so he managed to get Medicare through Congress.
Since then, private insurance companies in the US have coexisted along side of Medicare in sort of a hostile truce. Private insurance companies have never stopped wanting to either eliminate or control Medicare. Jimmy Carter attempted to expand Medicare in 1980 and failed and, more recently, a Medicare expansion was attempted in 2009 that also failed.
Both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton tried to provide universal health care in the US by making private health insurance more affordable and available, but failed to get any legislation passed. Barack Obama has been moderately successful in expanding private insurance coverage in the US, but that expansion has met fierce opposition from the health insurance industry.
The vast majority of people in the US who have health insurance that’s neither Medicare nor Medicaid still get their insurance through their employer. The fact that most health insurance is bought by employers, and not consumers, is a major reason our health care system has become so confusing and byzantine.
Since most people in the US get their health insurance as a benefit, rather than purchasing it directly, we’ve grown to expect the insurance companies to manage all or most of our health care costs. So, our employers buy our health insurance for us and our insurance companies manage nearly all of our health care. This arrangement ensures that the average consumer has almost no direct input on the cost of their own medical care.
Any time you allow another party to to have complete and unchecked control of your finances, they will always find ways to manage your finances to their own benefit. Employers purchase our health insurance but, since they’re the ones paying for it, they’ll look for insurance plans that are in their best interests, not the best plans for their employees.
Insurance companies control almost all of the money that goes into health care. That means that the more our health care costs us, the more power they have. Clearly, there is no reason for insurance companies to want to cut health care costs and the insane levels of over billing in health care give the insurance companies an excuse to keep increasing their payments (and your premiums). The many layers of confusion, byzantine systems of networks and obscure rules also work to the advantage of the insurance companies because they make it very difficult for anyone even inside of health care to trace where all of this money is really going.
So, where is all of this money going?
The simplest answer is that the money is going into the pockets of the many providers of health care. After all, for any great deception to work, all or most of the players in the deception have to be paid well enough to not ask too many questions or cause trouble. You can’t run a major con game unless everyone necessary to make the con work is happy enough with their role to not want to cause trouble.
The best way to account for where all the money is going, then, is to list all the various players in our health care system and describe their role in driving up these costs. So, in no particular order, here they are:
1) The pharmaceutical companies: These companies have the highest profit margins in health care and some of the highest profit margins for any industry. Given the ridiculously high prices of brand name medications, not to mention the rates at which these prices are increasing, the pharmaceutical companies would appear to be an obvious target for why health care prices, overall, are climbing so rapidly in the US.
The truth is, though, that the total revenue for the pharmaceutical companies has been rather flat since 2008. This is because the pharmaceutical companies have had very few good ideas in the past 20 years. So, even though the prices of most brand name medication are insanely high, and going up, we’re buying far fewer of them. Big pharma’s contribution to health care prices in the US isn’t what it used to be. The pharmaceutical companies are still quite bad, but their overall contribution to the rising cost of health care in the US is waning.
2) Pharmacies: If you pay too much money for your prescription drugs, chances are it’s your pharmacy, not the pharmaceutical company, that is overcharging you. Over 80% of prescriptions written in the US are for generic medications. Most of these generic medications are bought using insurance and the insurance copays for these medications are typically more, sometimes far more, than what the medication really should cost. This means that retail pharmacies gouge consumers on prescription medications far more often than pharmaceutical companies gouge us.
3) Pharmacy Benefit Managers: A major source of income for pharmacy benefit managers is from collecting a portion of your copay when you over-pay for your generic prescription drugs. In other words, if you use your insurance to buy 30 cheap generic pills from your local pharmacy, you might pay $10 for 60¢ worth of medication.
Your Pharmacy Benefit Manager (which is either contracted by your health insurance or a branch of your insurance company) gets to collect some of your copay from the pharmacy. How does it benefit you to have a third party take some of your overpriced copay? It doesn’t, of course. Pharmacy Benefit Managers couldn’t exist at all if the pharmacies were more transparent about the prices of prescription drugs and they know this.
4) Doctors: In October 2014 a segment on 60 Minutes profiled the fact that cancer doctors have a severe conflict of interest when choosing chemotherapy agents for their patients. In fact, all doctors who administer drugs in their offices get a commission based on the price of that drug. This means doctors have a strong financial incentive to give the most expensive drug they can justify if that drug is administered in the doctor’s office.
This conflict of interest has even encouraged some doctors to commit massive fraud. Even in the absence of fraud or conflicts of interest, though, doctors over-bill for office visits in the same way that all other health care providers over-bill for medical services. Over-billing is a huge problem in health care because it allows patients to be overcharged for medical services whenever they’re uninsured, their insurance denies coverage for a service, or their insurance company isn’t responsible for covering the cost of the service. Clearly, any time people are forced to pay too much for services, the cost of those services goes up.
5) Hospitals: There has been a lot of recent media attention to the excessive mark ups in most hospital bills. Hospitals certainly aren’t the only institutions in health care that over-bill for medical services, but they’re easily the worst offenders. Over-billing drives up health care costs for the reasons listed above, but it also serves to strengthen the power insurance companies have on health care.
Since insurance companies never have to pay the insanely high billing charges that hospitals and other health care providers use, these billing charges allow the health insurance companies to act as protection rackets. You need your health insurance to “protect” you from an $80,000 hospital bill, even though the insurance company might only pay $15,000 for that bill.
6) Health Insurance Companies: There is no single “bad guy” responsible for pocketing all of the money in our health care system. The money in health care is spread around rather evenly throughout the industry. But the health insurance companies bear most of the blame for why health care is so overpriced in the US. They control most of the money that goes into health care and directly benefit from all of the obscurity and waste that exists in our system.
The health insurance companies aren’t hiding any money— they know that would be stupid. Instead, they’re distributing the money to all providers so they can drive up their revenue by driving up their costs. This strategy helps to ensure that most providers will side with insurance companies in opposing health care reforms. They also know that the more everything costs in health care, the more everyone will rely on them to manage these costs. They’ve effectively rigged the game in a way that allows them to win every time they make things worse for everyone.
Why is health care in the US so difficult to reform?
The simple answer is that few people in our health care system really want reform. Florida governor Rick Scott put it best when he said:
“How many businesses do you know that want to cut their revenue in half? That’s why the healthcare system won’t change the healthcare system.”
Everyone in health care likes the idea of making our health care system more efficient and less costly, right up until it starts to impact their paychecks. So health care reform, of any kind, will always be met with a lot of resistance from inside the system. All of that money isn’t just wasted— it’s going into the pockets of a lot of people who will fight very hard to keep things as they are.
There is no shortage of good ideas for how we can reform our healthcare system. Nearly every other country in the developed world has a healthcare system that’s less expensive, more efficient and has better outcomes than ours. We could easily take all the best ideas from all the existing systems in other countries to create more efficient and effective ways to deliver healthcare in the US, were it not for the resistance each new idea would face. At least $1 trillion is wasted each year in our healthcare system, but the people getting that $1 trillion can use that money to fight reform at every turn.
So, what can we do?
Clearly we need more legislation that will both mandate transparency in our healthcare system and protect consumers from over-billing. Insurance companies need to be more transparent in their financial statements. Pharmacies need to be more transparent with prescription drug prices and the bills from all healthcare providers should reflect the cost of the services provided.
Without increased transparency and protection from over-billing, no reform will effectively reduce our healthcare costs or even slow the rate in which they’re increasing. Increased transparency in health care costs would make it very difficult for health care providers and insurance companies to continue operating the way in which they do now.
Most of all, remember: All healthcare reform in this Country will be met with strong opposition from inside the healthcare industry. They’ll say anything to prevent it simply because they’re protecting their own bottom line. If you’ve learned anything from this website, you should know, you can’t always believe what the health industry “experts” are saying.
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