This was a really interesting piece that was in the Times the other day — how hospitals and doctors jack up the charges to evade cost controls. You should read it in self-defense:
Before his three-hour neck surgery for herniated disks in December, Peter Drier, 37, signed a pile of consent forms. A bank technology manager who had researched his insurance coverage, Mr. Drier was prepared when the bills started arriving: $56,000 from Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, $4,300 from the anesthesiologist and even $133,000 from his orthopedist, who he knew would accept a fraction of that fee.
He was blindsided, though, by a bill of about $117,000 from an “assistant surgeon,” a Queens-based neurosurgeon whom Mr. Drier did not recall meeting.
“I thought I understood the risks,” Mr. Drier, who lives in New York City, said later. “But this was just so wrong — I had no choice and no negotiating power.”
Ain’t Capitalism grand? Especially the unregulated and underfunded Republican brand of Capitalism? Putting the proper regulations in place and providing a fully funded agency to enforce those regulations takes good governance. But good governance all over the United States is in short supply these days. Bringing “good governance to the ME is the stated goal of the Obama administration. Bombing the shit out of the place is how they intend to get their. (it worked real fine for the Israelis in Gaza now didn’t it). If we can’t get “good governance” here in America, how do you suppose the warmongers are going to achieve “good governance” in the Middle East? According to them they will kill the “network of death” out of existence. Talk about hubris and the fantasies it comes up with.