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Why do medical costs keep increasing so much?

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iFX said:
The government devaluing our currency through social spending programs (see: bank bailout 2008 & stimulus 2009) doesn't help the costs of anything, including health care. 🙂
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I can somewhat understand that but the cost was rising even when the dollar was at a high value before the crash.
 
Cost of healthcare comparison:
healthiness_3584_image001.gif
 
I posted the chart to show that healthcare seems to be rising in cost above the rate of inflation.
 
I comes down to plain and simple GREED. Unchecked by regulation or the normal laws of supply and demand, our healthcare system has become the cash cow for the greedy.

Greed from the insurance industry
Greed from pharma companies
Greed from medical supply companies
Greed from healthcare providers
Greed and corruption from politicos and regulators


Look at practically any commodity be it paper based supplies or computers and the formula seems to be:
Sell it through normal retail channels and the price is Y
Sell it to the mililitary and the price is Y x 2
Sell it to the healthcare industy and the price is Y x 3

Sick and dying is the new growth industry in America and everybody wants an ever larger piece of the action
 
Juddog said:
I posted the chart to show that healthcare seems to be rising in cost above the rate of inflation.
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Right, and if you look at my post, I've pointed out things that increase medical costs that don't apply to other products/services.
 
The health insurance industry also has an anti-trust exemption, exempting it from price-fixing and other anti-competitive practices.

Maintaining this is equivalent to satanic worship.
 
ScoobMaster said:
One reason that costs are inflated and rising is that we that have insurance and the means to pay for services keep having to "ante up" for those who do not. Urban Outdoorsmen (homeless), Illegal Aliens, and just the general poor who show up at en emergency room needing treatment are not turned away. After they get patched up with expensive emergency room surgery and are sent on their way, the medical facility is not just going to "eat" that cost. It gets spread out on top of the prices the rest of us PAYING customers get charged (just like the "shoplifting loss" is factored into the retail prices of goods).

We good hard-working, law-abiding, productive citizens always get mooched on by the slackers, the lazy, and the dishonest.
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you're anger is understandable but misplaced.

A few years ago my 7 year old nephew had a reaction to something; his temp shot up and he became delirious. So my sister rushed him to the emergency room.

Turned out to be nothing serious but the bill was $1500 (!). All they did was check on him and give him some medicine.

My sister had full coverage and her family is wealthy. But imagine the same scenario with an uninsured mother.

Uninsured people get charged around three times as much as the insured.

So your friendly neighborhood hospital would report it as a close to $5000 loss - and use that "loss" to justify charging you more.

Don't blame the uninsured - they're great for getting more money out of you.
 
Slew Foot said:
No ones told him the answer he wants to hear yet, so he's ignoring everything else.
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Not at all; people are keen to jump on a poster here for any possible sign of weakness, ready to insult at the slightest opening. Standard internet dickwad symptom.

Then there are the other posters posting constructive comments. I've already learned a bunch from this thread regardless of people like you and how badly you want to insult someone on the internet.
 
ScoobMaster said:
One reason that costs are inflated and rising is that we that have insurance and the means to pay for services keep having to "ante up" for those who do not. Urban Outdoorsmen (homeless), Illegal Aliens, and just the general poor who show up at en emergency room needing treatment are not turned away. After they get patched up with expensive emergency room surgery and are sent on their way, the medical facility is not just going to "eat" that cost. It gets spread out on top of the prices the rest of us PAYING customers get charged (just like the "shoplifting loss" is factored into the retail prices of goods).

We good hard-working, law-abiding, productive citizens always get mooched on by the slackers, the lazy, and the dishonest.
Click to expand...

On a somewhat-related note, there's a great Malcolm Gladwell article from a few years ago about the homeless problem and how it can actually be less expensive to simply use gov't funds to pay for an apartment for the chronic homeless than to provide shelters and let them wander the street. Those ER costs play a huge factor.
 
Question for those in the know: does insurance costs for say Malpractice actually have to have some kind of profit margin which puts a limit on how much money an insurance company can make? I'm wondering why the malpractice insurance has skyrocketed in price.

Also regarding the health insurance companies making a huge profit, I fully agree as I visited a shall not be named healthcare insurance company a few years ago for job related purposes and it seemed like they had more money than they knew what to do with. They had an incredibly expensive looking office building and security system, and had enough money to basically repave one of their parking lots that looked perfectly fine before they repaved it.

It seemed like one of those "well if we don't spend the extra money in the budget, we won't get the same budget next year" so they just picked stuff to spend the money on rather than give some of that money back (e.g. reduce cost of the health insurance) so that they could keep their inflated spending budget.
 
Juddog said:
Question for those in the know: does insurance costs for say Malpractice actually have to have some kind of profit margin which puts a limit on how much money an insurance company can make? I'm wondering why the malpractice insurance has skyrocketed in price.
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Big lawsuits lead to big malpractice insurance premiums lead to higher doctor fees and more defensive medicine / testing lead to higher health insurance premiums.

Patients today have access to a much wider range of information than they did 20 years ago. Just look at the medical threads on this forum; everyone thinks they can diagnose themselves / others just by searching WebMD. As a result, patients are far more demanding of their physicians and are far more trigger-happy when it comes to lawsuits when a diagnosis is missed or a treatment doesn't work as planned.
 
Culture of unhealthy lifestyles, hypochondria + ER visits, super-expensive treatments and procedures for extremely little reward during EoL stages, supply and demand, research costs, welfare/indigent care, etc, etc, etc...
 
here's something that a nurse working in a hospital told me.
it's the drug addicts that come in when they OD, illegal aliens for various ailments, or welfare moms bring their kids in to the ER for a headache when they are perfectly fine, but they do so knowing they will get a free meal.
and of course none of them have insurance.
 
iFX said:
The government devaluing our currency through social spending programs (see: bank bailout 2008 & stimulus 2009) doesn't help the costs of anything, including health care. 🙂
Click to expand...

That would only make sense if the price of EVERYTHING in the US was going up at the same pace, which is isn't. Overall price inflation is below 5% every year, healtchare jumps up in double digit percentages year after year.
 
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