Dear Cone Health: Free drug price comparison app debuts

"A new and free app
...lets you compare local prescription and generic drug prices.

Does Cone Health compare prices?

Healthcare Ethics: "The anatomy of a ripoff": If Ed Cone is on the board of Cone Health, and Jim Melvin thinks the merger is a great idea, how do they feel about this?

"...my teenage son was rushed by ambulance
...to Good Samaritan Hospital in Suffern after choking on a piece of turkey.

The care he received was appropriate; the bill was anything but.

The charges, in fact, were mind-boggling.

A statement the hospital sent to my insurance company
...showed that Good Samaritan billed $22,214.92
for a four-hour emergency room visit that included a physical exam,
sedation, endoscopy and extraction of the stuck food.

...it’s easy to think that he was seen less as a patient
and more as an ambulatory cash machine...

We must tear down the entire medical system in this nation

and imprison virtually all of the financial folks involved in it

-- especially Hospital-affiliated entities.

Karl

Even more astonishing, Aetna agreed to pay only $2,885.67 for the services
— just 13% of the bill — and the hospital settled for that amount.

...my son had a second choking episode two weeks after the first,
and the charges for his treatment at Somerset Hospital in Pennsylvania
were included on the same ...statement.

So I was able to compare bills for similar procedures at two emergency rooms.

What I learned was that the numbers printed on hospital bills
often bear no relation to reality.

That hospitals grossly inflate their charges,
expecting insurance companies to radically cut the bills
while hoping to wring bigger fees out of the uninsured.

That the bill inflation can include double-charging for procedures.

This sort of game-playing, where the intent is to catch "uninsured" people

and "gotcha" them into bankruptcy,

would be felonious in virtually any other line of business.

Karl

Fact Check on Health Care Legislation

I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients
…and never do harm to anyone.

In every house where I come,
I will enter only for the good of my patients,
keeping myself far from all intentional ill-doing.

Hippocratic Oath

"FACT CHECK: Obama's tone shifts on health care

President Barack Obama told voters repeatedly during the health care debate that the overhaul legislation would bring down fast-rising health care costs and save them money...

So far, the law he signed earlier this year hasn't had the desired effect.

An analysis from Medicare's Office of the Actuary this week said that the nation's health care tab will go up — not down — through 2019 as a result of Obama's sweeping law...

If federal budget figures indicated Medicare Part D
would cost more than $1.2 trillion between 2006 and 2015
why did supporters repetitively proclaim the program
would not cost more than $400 billion over ten years?

Obama offered some caveats when asked in his news conference Friday about the apparent discrepancy between what he promised and what's actually happening so far...

...OBAMA: Said he never expected to extend insurance coverage to an additional 31 million people "for free." He added that "we've made huge progress" if medical inflation could be brought down to the level of overall inflation, or somewhere slightly above that.

THE FACTS: Those claims may be supported in the fine print of the plan he pitched to Congress and a skeptical public months ago. But they were rarely heard back then. "My proposal would bring down the cost of health care for millions — families, businesses and the federal government," he declared in March.

Why wouldn’t the healthcare industry’s position
as a top political campaign contributor,
correlate to subsidized healthcare
being one of the government’s largest expenditures,
and if not, why does the healthcare industry
contribute so much to those who wouldn’t reduce profits?

Last August he predicted: "The American people are going to be glad that we acted to change an unsustainable system so that more people have coverage, we're bending the cost curve, and we're getting insurance reforms."

On Friday, he conceded: "Bending the cost curve on health care is hard to do." The goal: "Slowly bring down those costs."

If the Veterans’ administration can haggle for lower drug prices
why can't the government negotiate for Medicare part D?

The White House contends that although health care costs will rise when most of the changes take hold in 2014 and coverage is extended to the uninsured, costs will go down over the longer term as controls kick in.

OBAMA: "We took every idea out there about how to reduce or at least slow the costs of health care over time."

Does recently passed health care legislation
prevent insurers, employers and taxpayers indirectly pay for agreements
between brand name and generic drug companies,
keeping lower priced medicines off the market?

THE FACTS: One idea that most experts believe would do the most to control health costs — directly taxing health benefits — was missing in Obama's plan. Opposition from unions and others was too great, and Obama himself had campaigned against the idea.

Would healthcare cost less
if medical insurance wasn’t subsidized by tax breaks
and regulated pricing mechanisms?

Some of the major cost controllers that did make it into the law — including a tax on high-value insurance plans — don't start until 2018. That tax was watered down and delayed, and other cost-control approaches also softened after opposition from hospitals and other interest groups.

Health spending already accounts for about 17 percent of the economy and is projected to grow to nearly 20 percent in 2019.

Did ~86% of fiscal 2004’s $11.1 trillion
federal unfunded future obligation growth
reflect the long term costs of 2003’s prescription Medicare legislation?

OBAMA: "So these policies of cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans, of stripping away regulations that protect consumers, running up a record surplus to a record deficit — those policies finally culminated in the worst financial crisis we've had since the Great Depression."

THE FACTS: The president probably meant the broader economic crisis and not the meltdown of the financial industry when he talked about the "financial crisis." True enough, George W. Bush entered office with a $236 billion budget surplus in 2001, and in January 2009, before Obama was sworn into office, the Congressional Budget Office projected the deficit for the fiscal year 2009 to be $1.2 trillion.

Did the largest generation of parents in American history
promise themselves healthcare benefits
their children won’t have enough money to pay for?

But the surpluses the government foresaw in 2001 were based on a bubble economy that was bound to burst..."

Erica Werner And Calvin Woodward
Associated Press

Why hasn’t the Executive Branch or Congressoffered legislation mandating Medicare and Medicaidnegotiate prescription prices?

A Tumor at the Heart of Medicare

 

Medicare Part D

the prescription benefit that went into effect three years ago

was supposed to let the elderly get their medicines more cheaply

by creating competition between private insurers

 

…But the cost to taxpayers

has been 3.5 times the market value of those prescriptions

 

…Legislation was pushed

paid for and effectively drafted by thousands of lobbyists

 

Proposals requiring the government

to use the buying power of 40 million Medicare patients

to negotiate prescription prices

were defeated

 

…So prices under Medicare private insurance plans

for the top 10 medications shot up

 

…At sites like www.maplight.org

you can see whose campaigns have gotten the plushest contributions

 

Mark Lange

New York Times

 

Why wouldn’t the healthcare industry’s position

as a top political campaign contributor

correlate to subsidized healthcare

being one of the government’s largest expenditures

 

and if not, why does the healthcare industry

contribute so much to those who wouldn’t reduce profits?

 

Why are the United States and New Zealand

the only developed countries who permit pharmaceutical companies

to market directly to consumers

 

how much could the media industry lose if drug advertising was illegal

 

and why isn’t prescription promotion a political issue?

 

Does America’s healthcare industry maintain high profit margins

by providing superior care and/or medicine

or by financing the political process with profits provided by patients?