This $55,000 Bill Is The Perfect Example Of Our Broken Hospital System [View all]

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http://www.businessinsider.com/redditors-appendectomy-cost-5502931-2013-12



"I never truly understood how much healthcare in the US costs until I got appendicitis in October," wrote Reddit user zcypher, identifying himself as "a 20 year old guy."

***SNIP

So what's going on?

1. Sutter Health, which owns the hospital where zcypher had his appendectomy, has been sued for overcharging. "The chain, which runs 24 acute-care hospitals in California, agreed to pay $46 million in [an] out-of-court settlement, and also to give more pricing information to consumers, as the result of a whistleblower complaint charging that the chain's billing practices were false and misleading," Jeanne Pinder writes at Clear Health Costs.

2. Hospitals routinely charge vastly different amounts for the same procedure. A California study published last year in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that after an appendectomy, patients received bills varying from $1,500 to $180,000. The average was $33,000, and the researchers "included only uncomplicated cases with hospital stays of less than four days," the Associated Press notes. "There's no system at all to determine what is a rational price for this condition or this procedure," study author Renee Hsia of UC San Francisco told the AP.

3. Certain hospitals may be responsible for a large percentage of overcharging. An analysis published in the Harvard Business Review found that fewer than 2% of 7 million routine procedures studied "were 'defects' in the sense that the average total payment received per procedure in a particular hospital was a statistical outlier across all hospitals." (Not everyone agreed with this analysis.)



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