There ARE ways that health care could be made a lot more affordable. Health care is not a free market - it should be. Those who pay cash are very often charged far more than providers accept from Medicare and insurance companies. I have always found that to be not only wrong but reprehensible. Why should you be billed $3,000 for a CT scan that an insurance company pays $450 for? Our local hospitals charge $350 for a simple EKG - but if I did one in my office when I was in private practice, insurance companies paid me $35. So that is what I charged my cash-paying patients. Drugs are the same way - the pharmacy benefit management companies (PBMs) negotiate kickbacks to insurance companies from drug companies for putting their product as a "preferred" product on their formulary. The drug companies then offer c**pons to reduce copayments - good only for those with insurance. So the Lyrica that will cost your $450 per month cash may only cost the insurance company $200 - and the customers of the insurance company, who are told that they have to pay a $75 copayment for this expensive medication, get a c**pon for $50 off each month for a year. This is all hidden from the consumer, and is somehow considered a legal business practice.

I have proposed for years that there should be an "uninsured patient protection act" which says that the cash price for a medication or medical procedure/service should never be more than 10% higher than the lowest discounted price for insurance companies. That would make health care far more fair to everyone.

There ARE ways that health care could be made a lot more affordable. Health care is not a free market - it should be. Those who pay cash are very often charged far more than providers accept from Medicare and insurance companies. I have always found that to be not only wrong but reprehensible. Why should you be billed $3,000 for a CT scan that an insurance company pays $450 for? Our local hospitals charge $350 for a simple EKG - but if I did one in my office when I was in private practice, insurance companies paid me $35. So that is what I charged my cash-paying patients. Drugs are the same way - the pharmacy benefit management companies (PBMs) negotiate kickbacks to insurance companies from drug companies for putting their product as a "preferred" product on their formulary. The drug companies then offer c**pons to reduce copayments - good only for those with insurance. So the Lyrica that will cost your $450 per month cash may only cost the insurance company $200 - and the customers of the insurance company, who are told that they have to pay a $75 copayment for this expensive medication, get a c**pon for $50 off each month for a year. This is all hidden from the consumer, and is somehow considered a legal business practice.

I have proposed for years that there should be an "uninsured patient protection act" which says that the cash price for a medication or medical procedure/service should never be more than 10% higher than the lowest discounted price for insurance companies. That would make health care far more fair to everyone.