re: How Do We Fix American Healthcare?

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In many (perhaps most) cases, hospital administrations are breathtakingly uninformed as to costs, potential cost savings, and purchasing impacts. A transactionally opaque, anticompetitive pricing environment enables operational incompetence. Often no one, from top to bottom, has a clue as to costs.

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I have been home for a few years now and I know this stuff changes daily. But when I was in administration, I think we had a good handle on costs, cost to charge ratio, cost reports, large group purchasing, etc. We surely had waste but we stayed ahead of the game. Things have changed and thankfully, I was gone before ObamaCare. But, what you say about the complexity of the whole issue drives home my point that the general consumer can't make two cents out of healthcare pricing. I am all about transparency but the healthcare consumer is the least informed of all industries. You can't kick a tire and pick your hospital based on some arbitrary price list that means nothing to even the back office people that work in the billing office. Someone codes the procedures, someone punches in the codes and out spits a bill. Insurance gets in from there, whoever that might be.