Do you think health care costs are too high???

I think charging $5 for an aspirin in the hospital is a bit much, but, they do have to throw in all the over head they have.

Looking over some recent EOBs, it got me thinking..... $350 for a consultation??? I know the doctors have to go to school for a long time and have to be very skilled and knowledgeable, so maybe this is reasonable. Heck, don't lawyers charge around these fees, too??? And they aren't dealing with your life in their hands.

What do you think??

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Doing the right thing isn't always the same as doing the easy thing.

Are they too high? I think so when compared to other things I would also consider to be necessities. The $350 you quoted for a consultation is equal to my electric, gas, and water bills combined for one month. And that $350 consultation would be the beginning of care and likely not a one-shot fix.

I don't know what the answer is, though. I recently heard that malpractice insurance associated with baby deliveries runs $120K/year for a single doctor. That means roughly $2,500/week must be brought in by a clinic just to cover that single expense for one doctor... and that doesn't count salaries, benefits, the cost of the ultrasound machine, the lab techs, the overhead of the space (plus utilities)... etc. If a Dr. sees 20 patients a day and works four days a week (assuming one on-call day) that's 80 patients, tops, it'd be $31.50/pp just to cover the overhead of his malpractice insurance and nothing more.

So yeah... it costs way too much for just basic care. It could be argued that without that care, we'd all be walking around in pain/ill/dying. And that's true. But that would also be true of not having food or water or shelter, and those things don't cost as much as medical care.

And yet... we live in a society where we want our Dr's to be equipped with expensive machines that will diagnose our particular malady, pronto. The pregnant people want them to have 3-D ultrasounds. The people with broken bones sometimes need not just a standard X-ray, but perhaps a CT, MRI, or bone scan. From mammograms on down, the equipment that costs tens of thousands of dollars to have on hand that is only used for a percentage of the patients is mind-boggling, and it drives our costs up.

I think some of it is too high and some of it is necessary and priceless. Delivery of my child healthy - priceless. BUT the ER that charged me $1000 for drug testing when I came in for a migraine that would not go away while I was 8 months pregnant and had been to my reg ob the day before, I think was not a necessary expense. I was coherent and would have could have answered any questions they had about what was in my system (nothing because I was sick and continusiously throwing up - I couldn't even keep tylenol down) BUT anyway, I think we get charged for extra stuff when we have insurance and then insurance put "stipulations" and hoops to jump through and no one is keeping tabs on what all is happening. I was charged my copay twice while I was pregnant when I should have only been charged once. The Dr.s office was mad at me for questioning the charge and said they just have to go by what the insurance charges them, insurance said I would need to ge tht eDr to re-submit with the proper coding to get the credit back. I went back in forth with both of them for several months then decided I wasted soooo much time on the phone it was no longer worth the $35.....but how many other patients were charged the same way and the Dr office/insurance got away with this scam (I still don't know who was making the money there). I can't decide which is worse the high cost of care or the high cost of insurance both are making money and they both feed off of each other.