Newser) – The charges on US hospital bills often seem entirely random and inconsistent, and now we know why: they probably are. The government has released data today on what 3,300 different hospitals charge for the 100 most common procedures.
The results show massive variation, reports the Washington Post. One DC hospital charges $115,000 to put a patient on a ventilator, while another in the same city charges $53,000. Nationwide it's even crazier: $5,304 for a joint replacement at one hospital in Oklahoma compared with $223,373 for one in California.Some hospitals cited in the data say their bills are higher because they're teaching hospitals or have a sicker and older patient base, the New York Times reports.But a Medicare official says the variation is still too large to fully account for the discrepancy. AsTime thoroughly exposed earlier this year, charges for different procedures are set by a hospital master list called a "chargemaster," which are wildly inconsistent across different hospitals and often bear little resemblance to what Medicare says are their true costs.
it's all about what you can get away with, if no one calls you for the gouging, you will milk it for all it's worth, greed driven org.'s and doctors are the primary excellerants as they provide the service.
the social programs are the targets which in turn raises cost which triggers republican rants about cost they are i bed with.
we all have heard the atrocities like $10.00 aspirin and such and outrageous ER bills that the republicans are all to ready to tell you it's your healthcare system, fine long as you never get sick or if so die soon or saddle your family to company store.
"If you’re charging 10% more or 20% more than what it costs to deliver the service, that’s an acceptable profit margin," says a hospital finance expert. "Charging 400 percent more than what it costs has no rational basis in it at all."
we need to pressure or representatives to require consumer concerned agencies to post what is reasonable and what is grand theft.
