Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Those Free Market Private Hospitals...Milwaukee has the most Expensive in Nation!!!

So how will the free market effect health care? We've been told by Republicans that competition will bring prices down. Well, no, there's no guarantee and it's not a true statement. Check this out. WHA:
A recent report by San Francisco company Amino ranked Milwaukee first for the most expensive hospitals in the United States among cities with 1 million or more residents.

The analysis by Amino found wide variation in prices among hospitals across the country and in Milwaukee. According to Vivero, there's "about (a) 163 percent difference for the same (billing) code, same services from facility to facility. And these can make substantial differences for people — in fact (they) can be the difference between being in debt or bankruptcy or not for consumers who are dealing with deductibles that are far higher than the savings they have in the bank."
Complicated Private Health Insurance: All of this makes knowing what the hell is in your health insurance plan impossible, and who can keep up with that, and then research whether the hospital isn’t going to bankrupt your family. Republicans seem to think we have all the time in the world to figure out how to spend our hard earned money, but still get ripped off:
"It’s not about going to the cheapest provider of care," said Vivero. "It’s about understanding, for a consumer, (what hospital) is in network," and also provides high-quality care.
The TrumpCare plan wants people to form or join larger groups to get a group discount rate. Well, how did that work out:
Southeast Wisconsin has long had a reputation for high health care prices, something business leaders have tried to control since 2003 when they formed the Business Health Care Group.
Nope, that didn’t work. The free market system is unpredictable and complicated (“nobody knew that healthcare could be so complicated”). So many variables that it can’t be controlled, especially when mergers consolidate power and higher prices:
Southeast Wisconsin’s historically high health care costs are due in part to an older population and little competition among providers.

"Part of it has been that they’ve been able to charge what the market will bear because it's a moderately concentrated market," said independent health care market analyst Allan Baumgarten. "It’s become more concentrated in the last couple of years. Part of it is you have certain systems, I would say specifically Aurora, which are regarded by many employers as 'must have' providers in a network because they are the (doctors) your employees want to see."

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