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Health Care Industry Charging an Arm and a Leg

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Now Doctors are Turning Away Cancer Patients

According to an article in the Washington Post on April 3, 2013, doctors are now turning away cancer patients who can’t pay out of pocket. We previously reported how MD Anderson, a leading cancer hospital in Houston, Texas demanded an upfront payment in cash from Sean Recchi before he would even be admitted to the hospital and about the mind boggling expense of prescription drugs. The patient by the way had health insurance. The admitting agent told him, “We don’t take that kind of discount insurance.” Fortunately, a family member was able to write the check for $83,900. that was demanded before treatment would begin.

Now doctors are doing the same thing – refusing to administer life saving drugs to Medicare cancer patients using the rationale that they they would be losing money because their payments from Medicare are reduced 2% by the sequester.   [Read more…]

Pharmaceutical Corporations Gouging US Customers Out of Billion$ Every Year

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But Indian Supreme Court Rules Against Big Pharma

America spends about $200 billion a year on prescription drugs. It’s becoming part of American culture from preschool, where kids are started on Ritalin for ADHD, to old age where typical seniors are consuming an entire palette of pills for everything from arthritis to high blood pressure to cholesterol. Drugs are the fastest growing part of the health care bill.

In 2002 the average price for the fifty drugs most used by seniors was nearly $1500. for a year’s supply. That’s for each drug. Most seniors are taking an average of six.

Drug prices are highest for people who are the poorest. That’s because they have no insurance, and, therefore, no bargaining power. Drugs are marketed extensively by means of TV ads. Those ads are usually followed by ads for law firms trolling for clients who have been harmed by said drugs.   [Read more…]

Barrio Logan No Longer a Food Desert: Gets Spiffy New Supermarket

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The new Northgate Gonzalez supermarket opened on December 12, 2012 bringing fresh foods and groceries to an area long neglected by mainline supermarket chains – Barrio Logan. It is located at the corner of Cesar Chavez Parkway and Main Street. Prior to opening, this ethnic Latino neighborhood had only the usual complement of fast food restaurants offered to poor ethnic neighborhoods such as McDonald’s and Church’s and Popeye’s fried chicken chains.

In a food desert there is little in the way of fresh fruits and vegetables, but thanks to the Mercado Redevelopment Project, Barrio Logan has been considerably spruced up and is a food desert no more! In 2010 The San Diego City Council approved plans to transform two city blocks of vacant land in Barrio Logan into the Mercado Project which also featured 92 affordable housing units.   [Read more…]

Mayor Filner Joins Forces with New York City Mayor Bloomberg

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San Diego and New York City mayors take aim at sugary soft drinks

In a speech yesterday at the Balboa Park Club, Mayor Bob Filner outlined his plans for combating the consumption of large quantities of sugary, fizzy soft drinks. After mentioning all the negative effects from their consumption such as obesity and Type 2 Diabetes, Filner said, “You know we live in America’s Finest City, and we can’t have America’s biggest lard asses walking around in America’s Finest City. Something must be done. Mayor Bloomberg and I are on the same page regarding this issue. So what I’m proposing is this: today I’m declaring that the entire City of San Diego is a Sugary Soft Drink District (SSDD). This will be a counterpoise and eventually take the place of the Tourism Marketing District (TMD) which has created so much controversy lately.

“And in consideration of that tax money which the TMD wants me to turn over to the hoteliers around here, I’ve come to a decision. Instead of turning over that money, I will put it to good use funding the SSDD. These monies will kickstart this project. We will put up ads on billboards and run TV commercials pointing out the negative effects of consuming sugary soft drinks. So not only will San Diego be America’s Finest City, but under my administration San Diego will become America’s Healthiest City.”   [Read more…]

Hospitals to US Citizens: Your Money or Your Life

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Chargemaster: Hospitals’ Killer App for Sucking Your Financial Blood Dry – Part 4

Hospital care in the US has morphed into a multi-headed monster in which every advance in medical technology ups the cost of medical care. What Matt Taibbi said about Goldman Sachs in a Rolling Stone article applies to hospitals as well: “[They are] a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming [their] blood funnel[s] into anything that smells like money.”

More expensive technologies like cat scans are used when less expensive ones would be adequate to do the job. In addition to the economic incentives to use more expensive technology and equipment, there’s the legal incentive that doctors are less likely to be sued if they administer every test under the sun and use the most expensive equipment. Drugs that are administered to cancer patients can cost tens of thousands of dollars a shot.

The Chargemaster is a humungus computer file which details every charge that a hospital can add to a patient’s bill from a lowly aspirin to heart surgery. A recent perusal of a Chargemaster for San Diego’s Scripps Memorial Hospital revealed over 54,000 items.

These charges are so far removed from actual costs to the hospitals (most of which are non-profits) that the US spends twice as much on health care as most other advanced nations – 20% of GDP compared to 10%.   [Read more…]

How Hospitals Mark Up the Cost of Over-the-Counter Supplies Like Aspirin and Q-tips as Much as 1000%

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Chargemaster: Hospitals’ Killer App for Sucking Your Financial Blood Dry – Part 3

Hospitals charge their customers … er, patients, through the nose for simple products which anyone can purchase at WalMart for a fraction of the amount. In Part 1and Part 2 we detailed the ridiculous prices hospitals routinely charge their patients – like several thousand dollars a day – just for a room. In this installment we will go over the markups on products that are added on to patients’ bills.

Suffice it to say that for anything consumable, there will be a Chargemaster billing item. The Chargemaster is the giant computer file that lists the charge for every possible medical service and supply that a hospital provides. Nothing is “included.” Everything is billed out separately, ala carte.   [Read more…]

Health Insurance Scams Leave People High and Dry

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 Goldman Sachs, Blackstone Group make hundred of millions selling useless mini-med policies

Part Two of a series on the Business of Health

In Part 1 we told about how hospitals have a huge computer file called a Chargemaster that details prices for every possible item a hospital can charge for. These prices don’t have anything to do with reality because in fact there is no market for health care services.

In a truly capitalist economy there would be a competitive market by means of which people could check prices and choose the service that’s the most reasonable in terms of price and other factors. It’s called price discovery.

Hospital charges represent a dark market just like over the counter derivatives because it’s next to impossible to get hospitals to reveal their prices for any of their services. According to an extensive article in Time, the author was given the brushoff and even told it was illegal every time he tried to get pricing information. Therefore, the Chargemaster details prices that are sky high and out of sight compared to the paying abilities of most Americans.

In Part 2 we will cover the plight of many folks who thought they had sufficient health insurance coverage only to be told that their insurance policies were useless and they would be required to pay cash upfront if they wanted to access hospital services.
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Chargemaster: Hospitals’ Killer App for Sucking Your Financial Blood Dry – Part 1

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We spend more on artificial knees and hips every year than Hollywood collects at the box office.

A recent exhaustive article in Time magazine details the exhorbitant charges that hospitals are imposing on the American people, charges that have nothing to do with the actual costs of services provided. A woman in Stamford, Connecticut suffering from chest pains called 911. She was taken by ambulance to the emergency room at Stamford Hospital, a non-profit institution, four miles away.

After a few hours of tests she was told that she just had a case of indigestion; her heart was fine. So she went home. Her bill: $21,000 – for a false alarm. That breaks down to $995. for the ambulance ride, $3000. for the doctors and $17,000. for the hospital. Unfortunately, she had no insurance because she had been out of work for a year.

The American medical marketplace is such that those least able to pay are charged the most money. Their prices are determined by what is called a Chargemaster, a massive computer file thousands of items long. Every hospital has one.   [Read more…]

Today’s College Graduates: In Debt and Unable to Find a Job

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The American mythology that getting a good job requires a college degree is turning out to be a hollow promise, a mythology devoid of any connection to reality. Today’s college graduates are being weighed down with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, and many of them are either unemployed or working in jobs that don’t require a college degree.

A recent study has shown that half of recent college graduates can’t find jobs. Those who graduated since 2009 are three times more likely to not have found a full-time job than those from the classes of 2006 through 2008. Of those who did find a job, the study indicates that 43 percent had jobs that didn’t require a college degree. Sure the top 10% will get jobs right out of college, but for everyone else disappointment in the job search abounds. Even recent PhDs are facing stiff competition for fewer available jobs, and many of them end up driving taxis for a living.

At the same time that college graduates are not finding work, there are 3.7 million job openings, but these are the kinds of jobs college graduates aren’t equipped to do.   [Read more…]

Massive Winter Snow Storms Hit New England and Midwest

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Winter storms now are almost always blizzards because they are accompanied by high winds. Take winter storm Nemo, for example, which hit the New England states on February 9, 2013. Over 700,000 people lost power. On Long Island, upwards of 40,000 people lost power, with downed wires from tree limbs and heavy snows being cited as the primary reason. Four states declared states of emergency – Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New York.

Record snowfalls accompanied by high winds – blizzard conditions – these are some of the manifestations of global warming. In the summer record rainfall precipitation events are often accompanied by high winds and tornadoes. This is becoming the norm these days.
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Why Democrats and Republicans Are Both Wrong About the Economy

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The unemployment rate is 7.8%. Both parties agree that this is too high, but they propose totally different solutions to create more jobs. The Republican solution is to give more tax breaks and other advantages to the rich and to corporations because they are the job creators.

Really? Then why haven’t they created more jobs in the last 30 years. This historical experiment of “trickle down” economics has been tried since the time of Ronald Reagan and it has proven to be an abject failure. Yet Republicans are still pushing it as the solution to all our problems.

Esteemed Nobel laureate and Princeton professor Paul Krugman wants to take the traditional Keynesian approach and do deficit spending to improve the economy. He says there’s no reason to worry about the deficit since the US can borrow money at extremely low rates. Not to worry. He sides with Dick Cheney who famously said, “Deficits don’t matter.”

Cheney and Bush then went on to add trillions to the national debt by fighting two unpaid for wars, tax breaks for the rich and an unpaid for prescription drug benefit for seniors that was in reality a giveaway to the pharmaceutical companies. But now that a Democratic President is in office, Republicans are all worried about deficits. They should have been worried when George W Bush was doing the profligate spending.

However, I disagree with both Cheney and Krugman. Deficits do matter and here’s why:   [Read more…]

California Leads Nation in Fighting Global Warming

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As of January 1, 2013, the cap-and-trade portion of California’s Global Warming Solutions Act, AB 32, went into effect. Over 300 major polluters in California will face emissions reductions obligations, and in 2015, the program’s size will double to include transportation fuels and natural gas. These companies were given an allowance as to how much carbon pollution they can dump into the atmosphere. They can buy additional “allowances” from the state which held its first sale November 2012. There are more auctions scheduled.

Eventually companies will be able to trade allowances among themselves. So a company that emits less CO2 than they are allowed to can sell the remaining portion of its allowance to a company that exceeds its allowance. As years go by, the allowances will be reduced thus reaching California’s goal to cut its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020.   [Read more…]

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