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Date Posted: 19:12:19 02/22/10 Mon
Author: Bob
Subject: The simpletons (SC) who think the health care industry....

...is not a scam, from yesterday's SF Chronicle are these excerpts from the front page article titled, "Soaring Costs Laid to Growing Power of Medical Cartels.
The planned spike in health insurance rates by Anthem Blue Cross in California is just the tip of a Titanic-size iceberg of exorbitant price increases, secret pricing
and consolidation not only of insurers----but by hospitals, doctors and medical device makers that send bills to the insurers. Insurers, who strike deals with providers, pass the bills on to patients, businesses and governments. The nation is fast being bankrupted by a medical money machine that costs $2.5 trillion a year and takes $1 of every $6 that Americans earn.....While the Anthem case has raised a political storm, the underlying surge in costs gets far less scrutiny. But each sector of the health industry points fingers at the others for driving up prices, and all are raking in money."

What follows is one unbelievable example in the medical devices sector: "Christina Bernstein, a medical device engineer and independent sales representative based in San Francisco, sells disposable surgical tools for about $40 each. These are marked up and sold to hospitals for as much as $350, she said, for a single use in surgery on a patient. 'But if you were to get a detailed bill of what the hospital was charging the insurance company for the insured patient, those things get marked up to something like $1,200,' Bernstein said. 'It's ridiculous. There's no open competition.'"


For the history illiterates here, Teddy Roosevelt was known as "the trust buster," for taking on the cartels of his day. We have medical industry trusts/cartels now as the material above indicates.

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