TREDDITFIRST

Today's health care and pharmaceuticals are a disastrous nightmare.

schwanstucker

Yup. Selling an 80 cent needle for $143.25 is just fine, because nobody said I couldn't.

Try selling a gallon of water for $100 in a disaster area. "Nobody told me I couldn't..." that generally leads to prosecution for gouging.

we need transparency in costs, and a fair way of determining value. Of course, we also need better insurance, but that's been a given since I first started paying for my own insurance.

Spiral_Out

In a recent analysis of 50 hospitals (49 for-profit) with the highest charge-to-cost ratios in 2012, the average markup was 1,000 percent, which means that a procedure costing a hospital $100 is marked up to $1,000 for us.

Some of the markups test the limits of sanity: an 80-cent needle for $143.25 (a 17,000 percent markup). A 25-cent IUD device for $1,000. A blood test that costs $10 in one hospital and $10,000 in another.

A Johns Hopkins professor explained, "They are marking up the prices because no one is telling them they can’t."

Uninsurance can be deadly. Low-income minorities are least likely to have coverage, and the resulting financial stress, as documented by over 200 studies, leads to sickness and early death. Over 40 percent of uninsured adults of color would be eligible for Medicaid if the program were adopted by all states.

But it's not just the uninsured who feel the terror of unattainable health care. About half of privately insured Americans report experiencing financial hardship as a result of health care costs, and nearly half (43 percent) of sick Americans skipped doctor's visits and/or medication purchases in 2012 because of excessive costs. Even though with Obamacare the uninsured rate has dropped by nearly a third since 2013, the average deductible has more than doubled in just eight years, from under $600 to over $1,200, in large part due to corporate austerity measures. Many Americans can't afford this. A recent Bankrate poll found that almost two-thirds of Americans didn't have savings available to cover a$1,000 emergency room visit.