We locals love our hospitals. They support good causes. They offer free care to indigents. Their boards are filled with rocks of the community beyond reproach. Then there’s this clarion call. This is a masterful piece of writing. My favorite suggestion….. do away with unfair pricing over independents.
Sadly,Big Healthcare protects its own and has a lobby budget exceeding. —wait for it~$430 m annually. Dwarves the NRA ($4.75m) AARP ($14.5m) combined by over 20 fold. They are widely considered the most powerful lobbies. AMA spends under $24m.
Excerpt
2014, U.S. hospitals charged 2.6 times more per day for a hospital stay than did hospitals in other advanced nations.
Hospitals have increased profit margins by raising prices on the privately insured. The above analysis, by researchers at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), excluded maternity-related hospital stays, and adjusted for inflation and patients’ age, sex, race/ethnicity, geography, income, and medical episode. (Source: Selden et al., Health Affairs, 2015.)
Because hospital spending is the largest component of U.S. health spending—representing one-third of the total—rising hospital prices threaten the affordability of health care and health insurance for those who can least bear their expense.
