Why Health Care Costs Explode

When will ABC air Stossel's new healthcare report?

Don't forget the fact that so many Americans are obese. As long as we continue to stuff our faces with nutrient-free garbage, comprehensive health care is an illusion.

I'm sorry to read that your piece on Canadian HealthCare has been set aside for more coverage of Michael Jackson. At a time when the country is debating one of the potentially costliest programs, to this point in time, we need a balanced informational approach to making our decision in advising our politicians on what we want or don't want. You have always told us the truth and I'm concerned that ABC is in such unconditional support of the Obama agenda, as seen by the "medical infomercial", that your segment was intentionally stopped.
Please keep up the well-done investigative reporting you do with such class!

Thank you for listening to me.

Sincerely,
Rick Loveland

Why can't they still show the piece?

Excellent graph! Health insurance should be for catastrophic and emergency care -- heart attacks, cancer, etc. For most health care you should pay out of pocket and shop around for the best deal. Where this already happens -- Lasik, cosmetic surgery -- we find little cost inflation.

We need to eliminate insurance as a centerpiece of health care and end the silly employer tax incentive to provide such insurance. It's insanity.

Sadly, most public school-educated Americans lack the ability to read graphs. Take it from someone who's taught math at the college level.

It's basic economics that the less you have to pay for something, the more of it you'll use. And yet the “reformers” keep pushing for MORE health insurance.
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No kidding? If we didn't hjave it we wouldn't use it. So lets not have it, that way if you make enough you can have it, to hell with the rest of us. Right John?

Dare we neglect the memorializing of such a cornerstone of our culture (Mr? Jackson if you must ask!), to be informed about such trivia!
Thank you ABC for giving the entertain-me-couch-potato addicts what they want, rather than what they need. A good model for how to handle the health care isssue.

Stossel has a novel theory. We could dramatically reduce health care costs if all the sick people just stayed away from the doctor's office. In other words, If you're poor or under-insured and sick-shut up and die!
Hey, Bill, I finally figured out Stossel's backward(english speakers read from right to left). Did you notice what happened to the line in the Reagan years-straight up.
Bottom Line-There is no real price-competition for consumers of health care, (its illness treatment not a tangible commodity like potatoes), and the American people are weary of being gouged by the symbiotic pricing system of the modern medical industrial complex.

B. Bear -

What role, if any, does Federal and State government legislation play in the "symbiotic pricing system of the modern medical industrial complex"? In your view.

Wow. I look at lots of data and rarely do I see a relation like that.

I think that graph would look similar for other things that are paid by third parties - K-12 education, college tuition and government.

Perhaps government has grown so large and expensive because it's largely funded by a minority of voters. What incentive do the majority of voters have to vote for less government when they can get more government and government benefits with no direct cost.

The problem of a third party payers is compounded by the federal government's role as the largest third party payer, under its Medicare and Medicaid programs. The federal govenment won't pay a discriminatory rate, so "health care providers" can't gouge Medicare and Medicaid without gouging the rest of us.

Hold on! No one is discussing what is REALLY driving up healthcare costs!

Healthcare providers negotiate with insurance companies about how much they will be reimbursed for medical procedures. Providers, in order to get full reimbursement for their costs hyperinflate the amount billed to the insurance company. For example: if a procedure costs $35.00, they will bill the insurance company $257.00 (based on my actual experience with a blood test) in order to recover their cost of $35.00. I would be willing to provide the documentation if you (John Stossel) choose to pursue this.

Part B of this is that uninsured patients are being billed at the hyper inflated price. If the insurance companies and healthcare providers would agree to pay what procedures actually cost, just about everyone could afford healthcare and BILLED costs would plummet. Of course the insurance companies would lose their profit thievery and healthcare providers wouldn't be profiteering off the backs of the uninsured.

Funny thing about that.

"Stossel has a novel theory. We could dramatically reduce health care costs if all the sick people just stayed away from the doctor's office. In other words, If you're poor or under-insured and sick-shut up and die!"

No, we should let people pay the cost of having a throat culture, so if you have the sniffles, you may be inclined to just stay at home and drink fluids. We don't need to engage doctors for small stuff like that. However, if things get worse after a few days, come on in.

Remember those $3.00 ATM fees? Do you really go to an ATM to get $10? If you have any sense you grab $100 or more, to reduce the relative cost of fetching money at 2am. And yet, its those $3 fees that motivates people to put ATM machines out there, so you can get money at 2am if you want. See how a simple, small fee makes it possible to get money at 2am? If you can't see that, then you probably can't see anything bigger.

This interesting chart from the Goldwater Institute illustrates one of the main reasons health care costs have been skyrocketing

Correlation does not imply causation. Although it makes economic and logical sense that this trend has driven costs higher, the opposite might also be true. Higher costs might have driven demand of insurance plans which require less out of pocket.

Although I agree that a more free market healthcare system is needed, we have to be intellectually honest when advocating it. Don't want to pull an Al Gore.

And yet, in the rest of the advanced world they pay far less, sometimes nothing for health insurance out of pocket, like in England, but they get better care and the general costs are about 50% of ours.

Maybe we should outlaw health insurance altogether. That should cut the hell out of health care costs.