<p>There is a long article, the cover story, in Time Magazine about the US healthcare system.</p>
<p>Great article wriiten by Steven Brill.</p>
<p>What a mess…</p>
<p>Bitter Pill
How outrageous pricing and egregious profits are destroyimg our health care</p>
<p>There is a lot in the article…</p>
<p>Check it out.</p>
<p>Agreed. A fantastic and infuriating article.</p>
<p>I hope more people read the article. It affects all of us.</p>
<p>I just read that article yesterday, and I have to say it gave me a sickening feeling. It’s a terrible system. Ironic that medicare is one of the few programs that can somewhat control the cost of treatment, if you happen to be eligible for medicare.</p>
<p>Wow DH & I just had a lengthly discussion about this article. Very in-depth coverage and much food for thought.</p>
<p>Medicare for all! ;)</p>
<p>Do u think if doctors were told they are only going to make 100000 to 400000 tops, would we end up with a shortage of doctors?</p>
<p>I am just using doctors as an example… Everybody takes a cut… From the top down. </p>
<p>Would we end up with a shortage of health care workers?</p>
<p>[Bitter</a> Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us | TIME.com](<a href=“http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/]Bitter”>http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/)</p>
<p>Drs at 100K? Yes you would see a shortage. To get into med school now is astonishingly difficult. We always want our doctors to be the brightest men and women. If medicine does not pay well enough to make it attractive, those people will look elsewhere.</p>
<p>If the incentive is a high pay, aren’t you not necessarily getting those that are the best and brightest, but those that value money highly?</p>
<p>It takes too long and too much cost to become a doctor and make 100k. There would be a very severe shortage. As it is, shortages are occurring.</p>
<p>Ok forget doctors. </p>
<p>The article is scary enough.</p>
<p>Mini is right. The prices are made up. They have no economic justification. </p>
<p>We should increase Medicare payments 10 to 20 percent and
Everybody is on Medicare. </p>
<p>I can’t believe this article hasn’t stirred more dialogue in society. We are gouged.</p>
<p>When a high school football coach, a longshoreman, firemen and even some government clerical workers make 100K or more, yes, doctors are worth far more. Not to denigrate any of those jobs, but they do not require the education, intelligence, or skill of a doctor.</p>
<p>Paying 160.bucks for a procedure that costs 10 bucks?</p>
<p>Sound good?</p>
<p>Oldmom, thanks for the link</p>
<p>This has been the case for years. I went through this with my father. We provided a lot of his supplies when he was hospitalized and we got charged anyways, as there is some auto tabulator at some of these hospitals. You get charged whether you use the stuff or not .like the kleenex and other things right on up to some mighty pricy items, all at inflated cost. I remember paying for an anesthesiologist (whose head would have been put on a stick if I could have gotten my hands on her/him) when s/he wasn’t there when I had one of mine. I had to pay for the fact that one would be available if needed, and even though one wasn’t when I said I needed one, I was still charged. Part of the labor and birth giving tab at that hospital. </p>
<p>We have a very dear and old friend from college days, actually several in this category, who work in drug research. Like in drugs for cancer and other health problems. Though, yes, absolutely, they went into this field due to the intense interest in it, these very bright, gifted individual also want to make a very good living commensurate to that of their classmates and would leave the field if it didn’t pay the money it does now. </p>
<p>So when another friend is musing and contemplating becoming a drug mule to get some drugs from Canada that cost 50X more in this country that she needs for her DD’s intractable seizures and other issues from some rare condition, it’s hard to know what to say. </p>
<p>Though a lot of these researchers may have started out idealistic, by the time they are my age with spouse, mortgage, kids, commitments and wanting the monetary rewards for their brain power, they are saying “show me the money” when face with choices of what to develop in terms of meds. It 's a fact of life. </p>
<p>I wish I had a solution as I am right in the cross hairs of all of this. I have a kid who is a cancer survivor and I pay out of network,high fees to have him tracked as a survivor by the doctor who developed his protocol and where it is still used, at the best place for him, Memorial Sloane Kettering. My insurance feels he can go to an in network doctor and is not willing to pay their prices, so I pay. I can, so I do. What he will do, I don;t know. Scary, to me.</p>
<p>It seems to me that you cannot get an expensive procedure done nowadays without proof in advance that you can pay for it, unless you are dying in the ER. I wonder how the men in the article were able to get $950K worth of cancer treatment and a $50K back implant without proving ability to pay in advance?</p>
<p>So many prefer the status quo. What many fail to realize is that they have 1 million or even up to 5 million cap on their insurance. They will spend it all and end up bankrupt in the event of catastophic illness.</p>
<p>Cptofthehouse, scary post.</p>
<p>Like I said, Dstark, I am living it. We got a $30K charge once for my son for dental work which my insurance would not pay–that was when he was in treatment for leukemia as a child. The thing was, he did not get any dental work done. The most they ever did with his mouth was look in it. It took me a long time to get that straightened out. When you are in a crisis mode with a loved one, these things are not what you are focused on and technically we went past the time of challenge on that charge. The thing is some kids do need extensive dental work when get bone marrow transplant and other life threatening procedurs as abcesses in the teeth and mouth are a source of lethal complications. But few insurance cover dental work. Especially $30K of it and that was over 15 years ago. </p>
<p>If your insurance would not cover bone marrow transplants which a number of them did not do, they handed you the old fundraising kit, which, …and I swear I am not kidding, includes tin cans to put your kid picture on for collecting loose change.</p>