"Adding Up and Breaking Down Health Care's Big Price Tags" PBS Newshour 2/25/2013
Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): ......a big story on the big price tags attached to medical care.
Steven Brill spent months reporting his 26,000-word cover story in the latest issue of "TIME" magazine looking at what's behind our country's high cost of health care. What he found was startling: a few days of lab work that costs more than a car, a trip to an emergency room for indigestion that totaled more than a semester in college, and many more examples.
In response, the American Hospital Association released a statement that claimed the system is broken and that -- quote -- "Patients may look at a hospital bill and think the prices they see only reflect the direct care they received, when in fact what's reflected are all the resources to provide the care."
Steven Brill joins me now.
Welcome to the NewsHour.
STEVEN BRILL, TIME Magazine: Hi, Judy. How are you?
JUDY WOODRUFF: I'm well.
Let me just begin by, you paint a devastating picture of the American health care system, and you talk, of course, about a system that is based on private enterprise, the private marketplace in America. I guess my question is...
STEVEN BRILL: Exactly.
JUDY WOODRUFF: ... why isn't the private marketplace working?
STEVEN BRILL: Because the private marketplace in other aspect of our lives implies that there's some kind of balance between the seller and the buyer.
And in medicine, in health care, there is no balance. If you go into a shoe store and you see a pair of shoes and you say, well, maybe they're, you know, $200 dollars, I think I will buy them, and the guy behind the counter at the shoe store tells you that the shoes are $6,000 dollars, you can turn around and walk out. In fact, you can walk out and go up the block and go to a different shoe store. You don't have to buy the shoes.
And in health care, not only do you have to buy it, because you don't have any choice, but you don't know what the price is before you buy it. When you read the statement from the American Hospital Association, I sort of had to chuckle, because the implication there is that if they charge, as I found, $77 dollars for a box of, you know, gauze pads, the reason they're doing that is because of all the other care in the hospital that you're getting, the room and the board, the nurses and everything.
But they charge for that, too. There was one hospital that was charging $1.50, as you know from the cover of the magazine, for a Tylenol. And yet they were charging $1,791 dollars for the room. Now, you would think if you're paying $1,791 dollars for the room, they would, you know, decide to throw in the Tylenol.
"Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us" by Steven Brill, Time Magazine 2/20/2013 (includes below video)
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