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Miller-McCune glosses some recent research about the exorbitant rates the uninsured are forced to pay for medical care:

For example, one doctor billed $4,500 for an office visit when Medicare would have paid just $134. Another doctor billed $14,400 for removal of a gallbladder when Medicare would have paid $656. And a hip replacement cost $40,000 when Medicare would have paid $1,558.

….[Jeffrey] Rice said people should know they have a choice even when their insurance company is paying the bill. “Everyone knows you don’t buy a car without knowing what the Blue Book value is. Well the same should be true in health care,” he said.

….Previous research published in 2007 in the journal Health Affairs showed the “uninsured and other ‘self-pay’ patients for hospital services were often charged 2.5 times what most health insurers actually paid and more than three times the hospital’s Medicare-allowable costs.” The study by Gerard Anderson also found the “gaps between rates charged to self-pay patients and those charged to other payers are much wider than they were in the mid-1980s.”

“Blue Book,” of course, is a little harder to figure out for triple bypass surgery than it is for a 2003 Honda Civic.

In any case, this practice demonstrates both the pros and cons of going to the mattresses over inclusion of a public option in a healthcare reform bill.  On the one hand, the really important thing is to get the uninsured insured.  With anyone.  They’ll get better care and their bill will be way lower, regardless of whether they have a public or private insurer.  On the other hand, private insurance is expensive, and in most of the plans on offer middle income families (above a cutoff of about $50,000) won’t get any government subsidies to purchase it.  A public plan would (a) almost certainly be cheaper and (b) put price pressure on private plans to be cheaper too.  Result: more people are insured and fewer people are paying outrageous bills for common procedures.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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