
How to curb health care costs
Hospitals charge commercial payers far more than is needed to cover their expenses, with people who pay insurance premiums ultimately paying the price.
Hospitals charge commercial payers far more than is needed to cover their expenses, with people who pay insurance premiums ultimately paying the price.
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Now, with people struggling and in fear, is no time to prioritize bailing out the cruise ship industry or the fracking industry. When it comes to the health of the broader economy, we are likely to have more time to remedy the economic wounds than we will to address the physical and emotional wounds the virus will inflict.
I recently spent 45 minutes making calls to straighten out a health care billing problem. Multiply my experience by that of millions of Americans, and we collectively must spend millions of hours on the phone and online each year with insurers and providers to obtain insurance coverage, schedule appointments and straighten out incorrect bills. Many of these activities are a direct result of how complicated our system of providing and paying for care is.
In 2013, more than 550,000 Oregonians lacked health insurance. By 2017, thanks to the federal Affordable Care Act, that number had fallen by more than half. Recent changes by the federal government threaten to undermine this progress by making it harder for Oregonians who purchase insurance in the individual market to continue to do so. Our new report, A Better Health Insurance Market for Oregon: Options for Oregon to Maintain Consumer Access to Affordable Health Insurance, explores several options for how Oregon might respond to policy changes that threaten to weaken the individual insurance market.
Health care in the U.S. is incredibly expensive, and becomes more so every year. Thus it isn’t surprising that health care – especially the high cost of care – was a top concern for voters in the 2018 midterm elections. In the next two years, both Democratic and Republican policymakers will grapple with state and federal legislation that has the potential to modestly reduce the cost of health care.
Here are two things you probably don’t know about colonoscopies. First, they’re one of the most commonly performed screening exams. Millions of us get colonoscopies each year, but we don’t like to talk about it. Second, you probably don’t know how much a colonoscopy costs, even if you are a patient who has scheduled an exam. That’s because colonoscopies are like most health care services: patients don’t know the cost in advance of receiving care.
Associate Director and Senior Policy Analyst, Frontier Group