Imagine shopping for an airline ticket on a travel website with no prices. It’s three fundamental issues: pricing failures, inappropriate care, and middlemen. Q: In a couple sentences: What broke American health care and how do we fix it? Makary talked to the Observer about his findings and what they mean for Texas. The book stops short of advocating for large-scale government solutions like Medicare for All, or delving too much into the elephant in the room: The gaping partisan divide over how big a role government ought to play in health care. But it puts much of the onus on individuals to challenge powerful insurance companies and hospitals. Makary’s book is a call to action for medical professionals to speak out, businesses to look for better deals, and patients to push back on prices. But every bill can’t get its own news story-nor should it need to. ![]() Recent journalism series have shined a light on particularly egregious hospital bills, often leading to dramatic reductions in the charges for patients profiled. Among the most shocking revelations: Some hospitals routinely sue patients for payment and garnish their wages, and some doctors do unnecessary procedures for reasons of greed or convenience, including one obstetrician with a 95 percent C-section rate. health care prices have skyrocketed, leaving uninsured and insured patients on the hook for astronomical bills, with little warning or recourse. In The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care-And How to Fix It, Makary documents his travels around the country to illustrate how U.S. The study corresponds with the release of a new book by one of its authors, Johns Hopkins surgeon and health policy professor Marty Makary. ![]() The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care-And How to Fix It All are on the Texas-Mexico border, in one of the poorest parts of the state with one of the highest uninsured rates, where residents are often forced to forgo care or get stuck with bills they simply cannot pay. The four most expensive metro areas were in Texas: Brownsville-Harlingen led the country with a markup rate of 9.4, followed by Laredo, El Paso, and McAllen-Edinburgh-Mission. Add yet another first place health care ranking no one wants for Texas: We have the highest hospital bills in the country.Ī new study has found that Texas prices (before insurance) were on average 6.4 times higher than the Medicare-allowable amount in 2018, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins, who looked at Medicare fee-for-service claims around the country that year.
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