Comparing NIH to Obamacare is like comparing apples to rotten eggs. Who wouldn’t want the apple? Health care premiums for a family of three under NIH are roughly US$100 a month. In the U.S. a bronze plan for a family of three runs $1,000 a month, with the family required to pay the first $5,000 or more per year before insurance even kicks in. Deductible under the NIH? Zero. Yes, there’s a co-pay but it’s pocket change, a few US dollars.
Even with health insurance in the U.S. and after the deductible has been met families still get hit with medical bills because of the infamous “chargemaster” system of billing in the U.S.
And don’t even get me started on the legal lottery system in the U.S. which adds billions in unnecessary costs to health care in the U.S.
So, yes, I happily suck on the NIH’s teat because it gives good milk, unlike the witch’s teat of health care/insurance in the U.S.
[quote]Chargemasters gained national attention in early 2013, when in short succession, there were two important publications made. First, there was a Time magazine cover story published February 20, 2013, titled “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us”,in which reporter Steven Brill examined the overlooked role that chargemasters played in the American health care system’s cost crisis, asserting that they routinely listed extremely high prices “devoid of any calculation related to cost”, and were generally regarded as “fiction” in the healthcare industry, despite their significant role in setting prices for both insured and uninsured patients alike. Then, a couple months later, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services published inpatient prices for hospitals across the country in a publicly available format.
However, local and national press have addressed hospital pricing periodically over the past 20 years.
“The ‘full charges’ reflected on hospital Charge Masters are unconscionable”, wrote George A. Nation III in a 2005 piece for the Kentucky Law Journal. Health care economist scholar Uwe Reinhardt noted in a 2006 article for Health Affairs that the approach to chargemasters by hospitals would have to be modified to become more transparent, in order to encourage a form of consumer-driven health care to help improve the system. University of California, Berkeley professor of health economics James C. Robinson pointed out prior criticism of the chargemaster, “Much ink has been spilt bemoaning that incomprehensible foundation of hospital cost accounting and prices, the redoubtable chargemaster.” Robinson called for greater transparency as well as increased price standardization as steps to help remedy the situation.
In a 2007 article for Health Affairs, Gerard F. Anderson observed, “Without knowing what services they will use in advance, it is impossible for patients to comparison shop.” Anderson also noted the esoteric nature of the language on the chargemaster made it difficult for patients and anyone other than hospital administrators to understand. Anderson emphasized the difficulty of patients’ ability to interpret the chargemaster in a subsequent 2012 article: “Furthermore, most of the items on the charge master file are written in code so that only the hospital administrators and a few experts in the field can interpret their meanings.”[/quote]\