End-of-Life Warning at $618,616 Makes Me Wonder Was It Worth It - Bloomberg
The documents revealed an economic system in which the sellers don’t set and the buyers don’t know the prices. The University of Pennsylvania hospital charged more than 12 times what Medicare at the time reimbursed for a chest scan. One insurer paid a hospital for 80 percent of the $3,232 price of a scan, while another covered 24 percent. Insurance companies negotiated their own rates, and neither my employers nor I paid the difference between the sticker and discounted prices.
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In this economic system, prices of goods and services bear little relation to the demand for them or their cost to make — or, as it turns out, the good or harm they do. “No other nation would allow a health system to be run the way we do it. It’s completely insane,” said Uwe E. Reinhardt, a political economy professor at Princeton University, who has advised Congress, the Veteran’s Administration and other agencies on health-care economics.
Taking it all into account, the data showed we had made a bargain that hardly any economist looking solely at the numbers would say made sense. Why did we do it?
