Rusty Simon helps us with our crop fields every year!
Dear
Senators, I am writing about the filthy-high cost of health care in America and
I am asking you to hold hearings about this matter and bring the health
industry in America down a notch or two!
by Charlie
Leck
The March 4
issue of Time Magazine pretty much
sold out all across America – and that is a good thing!
For those of you who have not read the major explanation of how health care costs are arrived at, I’m first going to beg you to get the article somewhere and then read it [you can read it on-line here]; but if you don’t think you can or will, then I’m going to ask you to read my following summarization of it… (but I’d much prefer you read every word of the article).
The excitement
was caused by a long and brilliant article by Steven Brill, called Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing
Us. Let’s hope that each one of those purchased magazines was read by at
least one person and, more hopefully, possibly by many more. Let’s also hope a
whole bunch of these readers unleash letters to their congressional
representatives, asking them to do something, for heaven’s sake (I mean it)
about the high cost of health care in America – that is, the unnecessarily high cost of health care
in America. The operative word is unnecessarily!
And, how
sincerely I hope that my Congressman has read this article and you have also,
Senators Klobuchar and Franken. If you haven’t, you have failed your
constituency; for Steven Brill alerts us to a very serious problem that must be
solved.
I read the bulk
of the long, long story (more than 50 pages) at my sister-in-law’s lovely house
in Florida. It was her magazine and I vowed to finish it so I could leave it
behind for her, but several times I cautioned her about it.
“You may not
want to read this,” I said. “It’s pretty tough to take and it really makes me
angry at the system.”
“Oh, no,” she
responded vociferously, making sure I knew she wanted the magazine left for
her, “I definitely want to read it.”
You will read
about real people in Brill’s remarkable article – real people with real medical
and disease crisis in their lives. They are people who are financially ruined
by the American pharmaceutical, medical and hospital industry. Ruined – case
after case of ruin that would make you cry if you could stop screaming in
anger.
Health care costs in America
have reached the outrageous stage and they create one of the saddest stories in
American social history.
Steven Brill
tells this story – or, more correctly, he reports it. My reaction when I
finally put down the magazine was to go to a window and open it, so I could
shout out to the birds and the bees… “I’m madder than hell and I’m not going to
take this anymore!”
MD Anderson is a
non-profit hospital at the University of Texas. It reported an operating profit
last year of $531 million. It had revenue of over $2 billion. That’s a profit
margin exceeding 25%. The President of MD Anderson (remember, a non-profit
hospital), Ronald DePinho, was last year paid $1,845,000. None of this includes
funds that Mr. DePinho is allowed to receive from three major pharmaceutical
companies. Yes, yes, yes! I said it and it’s true. Does it smell to you of
conflict of interest?
The above
financial figures are not unusual and they are not necessarily at the top of
the scale for such hospitals and their operating officers. Brill points to many
others that exceed or rival these numbers.
“In hundreds of
small and midsize cities across the country – from Stamford, Conn. to Marlton,
NJ, to Oklahoma City – the American health care market has transformed
tax-exempt nonprofit hospitals into the towns’ most profitable business and
largest employers, often presided over by the regions’ most richly compensative
executives. And in our largest cities, the system offers lavish paychecks even
to midlevel hospital managers, like the 14 administrators at New York City’s
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who are paid over $500,000 a year, including
six who make over $1 million.
“Taken as a
whole, these powerful institutions and the bills they churn-out dominate the
nation’s economy and put, demands on taxpayers to a degree unequaled anywhere
else on earth. In the U.S., people spend almost 20% of the gross domestic
product on health care, compared with about half that in most developed
countries. Yet in every measurable way, the results our health care system
produces are no better and often worse than the outcomes in those countries.”
[Steven Brill in Bitter Pill]
Even while
hospital after hospital is raking in unbelievable amounts of money, paying
astounding amounts of money to their top executives and making most of their
physicians very rich people, they are virtually raping the general public in
order to provide these astonishing paychecks to their top employees. These
hospitals have no qualms about under-paying their nurses, technicians and
custodial employees. Nor do they have qualms about financially breaking many of
their uninsured or under insured patients.
I don’t want to
retell the stories of those several patients about whom Brill wrote. He tells
their tragic stories perfectly and explains how the particular hospital to
which they turned for help left them financial broken to the bone – finished
and dried up and without recourse.
The Chargemaster
Be sure to pay special attention to the section of the article sub-titled, Pay No Attention to the Chargemaster!
It seems to me
that the pricing scam behind the Chargemaster
system (about which Steven Brill writes so much) can be attacked and regulated
so that it is somewhere within the realm of reality. It seems that the hospital
bills we receive are all pie in the sky and we are not even to take them
seriously. Our job is to negotiate them down. Those skilled at negotiation,
like the trained employees of large health care insurance companies, get the
biggest discounts. Those of us who can’t negotiate are, to put it bluntly,
screwed!
A lot of us are
being ripped off and we shouldn’t take it anymore! It’s time to get mad as hell
and let someone know about it.
“Unlike those of
almost any other area we can think of, the dynamics of the medical marketplace
seem to be such that the advance of technology has made medical care more
expensive, not less. First, it appears to encourage more procedures and
treatment by making them easier and more convenient… Second, there is little
patient pushback against higher costs because it seems to result in safer, better
care and because the customer getting treatment is either not going to pay for
it or not going to know the price until after the fact.”
This is not a
short article. It will take some patience to read it thoroughly – but
thoroughly you must read it.
But, what a
shame it would be if you read it, and get upset by it, and then do absolutely
nothing at all. If you’re not up to anything more, at least print out this blog
and send it with a brief note to your U.S. Senators. That’s what I’m going to
do. I’ll ask Senator Amy Klobuchar and Senator Al Franken if they’ve read the
article by Steven Brill. I’ll ask that they do if they haven’t. I’ll tell them
I want to know their reaction to the article.
“What do you
think can be done about it?” That’s what I’ll ask them. And, I’ll tell them
that we must do something about it. If either one of them is unwilling to do
something about it, I’m going to assume they are receiving big campaign
donations from people within the health care industry – people who want to
protect their ridiculously and undeservedly high incomes.
“Senator
Franken,” I’m going to ask, “why aren’t you speaking up about this matter on
behalf of the ordinary U.S. citizen? Are you being paid-off to keep your mouth
shut about what’s going on?”
A section of the
article, sub-headed “The Way Out of the Sinkhole,” is important and it’s vital
reading. My Senators should look seriously at Brill’s suggestions. There is a
way to improve the system and to control costs. We’ve got to look at the
possibilities seriously.
Steven Brill
says we are being ripped off by a health care cost system that is out of
control. He says that one of the worst culprits is the non-profit hospital.
And, he shows us that many of the administrators of these so-called non-profits
are making obscenely high salaries (pay-offs) for non-profit organizations
(organizations that go out fund raising and claiming they need your help to get
along).
Steven Safyer, Montefiore
Medical Center, was paid $4,065,00 in 2011
(and his three top officers were paid
$3,243,000, $2,220,00, and $1,798,000).
Robert Trefry,
Bridgeport Hospital, was paid $1,800,000 in 2011,
Marna Borgstrom,
Yale New Have Health System, was paid $2,500,00 in 2010
These
are only a few of the dozens of highly paid hospital executive in America.
Brill mentions many of them and lists their outrageous salaries.
Medtronic’s CEO,
Omar Ishrak received total compensation in 2012 totaling 25 million dollars. He
deserved it, I guess, his company has been returning whopping profits to its
shareholders.
I’ve only been
showing you the tip of the iceberg here. There is much more to see and
understand. Somehow you’ve failed a lot of people if you don’t read this
extraordinary article. Again, you can read it on-line here.
________________________
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