Going without health insurance really wouldn’t be so bad if independent patients could pay the same per procedure as insurance companies do. But U.S. hospitals charge patients without health insurance an average of 2.5 times more for services than fees paid by health insurers, and 3 times more than Medicare does. According to a new study, that gap has more than doubled in two decades. It effectively excludes the uninsured from the system. “Fifty years ago, the poor and uninsured were often charged the lowest prices for medical services,” according to one author of the study, Gerard F. Anderson, director of the Center for Hospital Finance and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. “The markups on care for those who can least afford it have got to end.”
In other bad news, the Senate yesterday killed a move to allow patients to buy prescription drugs from abroad at a significant savings. They killed it by adding an amendment to require U.S. officials to certify the safety and effectiveness of each drug first, which would not be funded or feasible. To check for your own senator’s vote, here’s the roll call. A yes vote on the amendment meant they opposed drug imports. Obama, Brownback, and McCain didn’t vote. Clinton voted no. Hagel, Kerry, and Kennedy voted yes to the amendment.
