These are hospitals clearly taking advantage. A lot of people don't have the luxury of shopping around for the best price hospital or what if it's an emergency?
It's unfortunate how for-profit these medical institutions are instead of helping those that are sick/injured.
Topic: American Health care: $10,169 for a blood test? - page 3. (Read 2508 times)
Well one big issue is hospitals lose money from the uninsured who come in to the ER room all the time with everything from a simple cough to a broken leg and never pay their bill. The cost to pay for all these people ends up getting passed on to the paying consumer.
Prices are the way they are because insurance companies will pay whatever the hospital charges, mainly due to corruption and institutionalized cronyism, which is why handing obamacare over to the insurance companies was a huge joke to begin with. The cure is to stop electing the same assholes that work for the insurance companies as politicians and hospital boards.
That's not going to happen.
That's not going to happen.
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A lipid panel is one of the most basic blood tests in modern medicine. Doctors use it to measure cholesterol levels in their patients, probably millions of times each year.
This is not a procedure where some hospitals are really great at lipid panels and some are terrible. you are running blood through a machine and pressing buttons. That's it. And that all makes it a bit baffling why, in California, a lipid panel can cost anywhere between $10 and $10,000. In either case, it is the exact same test. "What we were trying to see is, when we get down the simplest, most basic form of medicine, how much variation is there in price?" More than 100 hospitals — with more than 100 different prices.
For this research, published Friday in the British Medical Journal, Hsia and her colleagues compiled reams of data about how much more than 100 hospitals charged for basic blood work. The prices these facilities charged consumers were all over the map. The charge for a lipid panel ranged from $10 to $10,169. Hospital prices for a basic metabolic panel (which doctors use to measure the body's metabolism) were $35 at one facility — and $7,303 at another. For every blood test that the researchers looked at, they found pretty giant variation.
http://news.yahoo.com/10-169-blood-test-everything-170003116.htmlThis is not a procedure where some hospitals are really great at lipid panels and some are terrible. you are running blood through a machine and pressing buttons. That's it. And that all makes it a bit baffling why, in California, a lipid panel can cost anywhere between $10 and $10,000. In either case, it is the exact same test. "What we were trying to see is, when we get down the simplest, most basic form of medicine, how much variation is there in price?" More than 100 hospitals — with more than 100 different prices.
For this research, published Friday in the British Medical Journal, Hsia and her colleagues compiled reams of data about how much more than 100 hospitals charged for basic blood work. The prices these facilities charged consumers were all over the map. The charge for a lipid panel ranged from $10 to $10,169. Hospital prices for a basic metabolic panel (which doctors use to measure the body's metabolism) were $35 at one facility — and $7,303 at another. For every blood test that the researchers looked at, they found pretty giant variation.
$10K for a simple blood test? This is outrageous. To say things are out of control with our health care is an understatement. It certainly shows you or a family member should ask up front what costs are at any hospital you are admitted into. What I would like to know is what [if anything] can be done to bring these prices back to realistic levels? Why can't there be equal billing right across the board? Isn't this something federal regulation should take care of? What would you do if you were handed a hospital bill that would drive you into bankruptcy or selling everything you own to pay? What can be done?
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