Hospital Price-Gouging Widespread [View all]

[unhappycamper]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Hospital-Price-Gouging-Wid-by-Sherwood-Ross-Charity_Emergency_Hospitalized_Medicaid-131204-374.html

Hospital Price-Gouging Widespread
General News 12/4/2013 at 11:31:47
By Sherwood Ross

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This is an expose about hospital profit-taking that has long deserved front page coverage. The Times provided that, thanks to Elisabeth Rosenthal's comprehensive reporting. Until yesterday, the outrageous billing practices of the nation's hospitals' has taken place largely in the dark.

Rosenthal opens with the story of Deepika Singh, 26, who gashed her knee at a backyard barbecue and the bill she got from California Pacific Medical Center(CPMC) of San Francisco came to $2,229. Then there was the case of Daniel Diaz, a public relations executive, who was billed $3,355.96 at Lennox Hill Hospital, N.Y., for five stitches on his finger. ($571.83 of the bill was charged for "application of a finger splint.&quot

Typically, the cost of treating a cut finger ranges from $790 in New England to $1,377 on the Pacific Coast. And that's just the emergency room, which has become a profit center, as at CPMC. "Once perennial money pits, emergency rooms have become big moneymakers for most hospitals in the last decade, experts say, as they raised their fees and 'managed' their patient mix," Rosenthal writes. Inpatients are also gouged.

"A day spent as an inpatient at an American hospital costs on average more than $4,000," Rosenthal writes. That's "five times the charge in many other developed countries," she continues, citing as her source the International Federation of Health Plans.