Medical Robbery

This blog is about an "industry" that affects just about all of us. In our modern society almost everyone has been to a doctor or hospital at one time or another. Sometimes the visits are for minor conditions, sometimes for life-threatening ones. But in either case we seldom ask what it's going to cost. And if we did, whoever is providing the service will have no idea. All that billing stuff is done elsewhere by someone else. At the time of the visit all the the office people want to know is if you have "insurance" and if you have a "co-pay," a usually small, fixed amount you pay per visit.

The quality of the medical service you receive may be good, bad or indifferent. The fact that doesn't change is that unless you have Medicare, the bill will be astronomical. And you'll find out about it only long after you've left the medical facility. When you open the envelope, you'll feel like a victim of a medical robbery. You may feel better in that "insurance" will pay all or a major portion of it. But as we shall see in a future post, that really just ain't so.

What prompts me to begin this blog is my son's visit to an emergency room for severe dehydration last April. They gave him two bags of saline solution in an IV, and the bill came out to be over $4,000. As an economist and as someone who manages a company's health plan, I see that this case, although relatively small, is nonetheless a clear example of how broken the American medical system is. It is slowly seeping the life out of the American economy while it continues on a path that is ultimately unsustainable.

In the course of this blog I plan to update on what happens as I refuse to pay the different emergency room bills my son accrued, asking the service providers to give some justification for what is commonly referred to as price gouging. As I do, I also plan to explain how this gouging becomes possible to begin with and what its effects are on individuals and on the economy as a whole. I hope you find the blog interesting and informative.