Health Care Reform: 8 Positive Changes

[Joanne98]

Positive change number one: Fewer uninsured Americans should lead to a lower-cost health care system.

The core of health care reform is helping (or forcing, depending on your point of view) 30+ million uninsured Americans find coverage. This is a direct and obvious benefit to them, but it should ultimately benefit all Americans since heath care provided to those without the ability to pay is a huge burden that resonates across the system in the form of higher costs on health care and its primary funding source, insurance.

If you don’t understand what I mean by that, check out a story I produced called “Killer Hospital Bills.” It’s about an uninsured woman who went into a hospital ER with abdominal pain and emerged with a bill for $12,000. While the size of the bill was big, the real story was that the exact same services would have been billed to a Medicare patient at $4,000 and to an insured patient at $5,000. When I interviewed the hospital CFO and asked about the discrepancy, his response was that since so many uninsured patients don’t pay at all, they’re forced to charge those that can exorbitant prices to recoup their losses.

That explanation is certainly shocking if you’re the uninsured patient facing a bill three times larger than a Medicare patient’s for the same services. On the other hand, it’s hard to blame the hospital. A store that loses millions of dollars a year to shoplifters is faced with a simple choice: charge paying customers more to recoup those losses or go belly-up. Hospitals that take patients who can’t pay (and they have to by law if a medical situation is life-threatening) are faced with the same choice: either charge those who can pay more or close their doors. Hospitals can’t charge either Medicare or insured patients more because those rates are negotiated in advance. So that leaves them with only one choice: to charge those patients who can least afford it… those without insurance… a lot more money for the same services.

http://www.moneytalksnews.com/2010/03/22/health-care-reform-8-positive-changes/