Time's Cover Article on Medical Bills

The cover of the latest issue of Time magazine (March 4, 2013) has a picture of a big “Bitter Pill” on it and the title of the lead article, “Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us.”

It's a long article, available here online, but you can catch the basic meaning of the whole from the little notation arrowed toward that pill on the cover: “One acetaminophen tablet cost 1.5 cents. Your hospital marks it up 10,000 %.”

I think it's safe to say that if something appears on the cover of Time magazine, it is something everyone has already known for some time. Time has always been a sort of report of the common view, often a view which is even just slightly behind what is current.

The article is loaded with examples of simply shocking criminality on the part of the medical industry but we know of it already. My neighbor fell and got a cut on his nose, and his wife felt he should go to the Emergency Room at the hospital across the street to have it looked at: they found nothing wrong and did nothing to it and then gave him a bill for over $8,000 and a bandaid.

I myself got a metal splinter stuck in the cornea of my right eye and went to the emergency room. An Intern took a pair of tweezers and a magnifying glass and pulled it out, taking less than four seconds to do it. The bill was $625. I talked with my optometrist about it later and he said that the standard charge for it was $125, set by the insurance companies, what he himself would have charged me. He also said, “If you had insurance they would have charged you $125 but since you don't have insurance, they can charge you anything they want.” The truth is that even $125 for what was done would be thievery.

The Time article, by Steven Brill, to be fair, brings out many more sources and ramifications of the “industry” than I was aware: for example, that so many of the incredibly profitable players are classified as “non-profits.”

Yes, but I still think it's true to say that everybody knows. In fact, probably a majority of the “Kansans” who are getting these extraordinary medical bills and reading about them are out there demonstrating for, campaigning for, voting for, lower taxes and less regulation on the very criminals who are playing them.

That's what moves me most about medical crime. The thought is that the situation is so bad, so horrifying, that it can't continue. People will eventually rise up in revolt. But that's part of the whole fantasy. It's one of the places Marx went wrong. The opposite could even be true: the more degraded people become, the less likely they are to be able to summon righteous, effective power to correct the situation.

The Time article does not even mention this.