re: Is the Healthcare/Pharma industry a giant scam?

I don't know if this is the right place for it, but I'll ask here anyway and maybe make a separate thread somewhere else. BUT...

I received a letter in the mail from an attorney yesterday. It seems I have an unpaid bill from OLOL from 2015. 2015 was a rough year for me and I met my deductible very early, well before this ER visit. I've never received any bills or anything concerning this particular visit. Nothing. Not one. Now, i have a $1700 judgement from an attorney with 33.3% going to the attorney.

frick that. I would have paid $20 a month to the hospital and paid it off saving myself $500. It's already a judgement though. My first notification. I haven't been hard to find, all my other bills sure made their way to my properly forwarded address.

Do I have any recourse or does the slimeball attorney just get his 33.3% no matter what I do?

They e-mailed with a charge of $475.00 and that's exactly what I paid.

Huge scam. Heath insurance has become more of a union, than an insurer, as the union can tell the service providers how much they will be getting paid from services provided to members.

Considering our litigious society, I couldn't understand why there was never a class-action suit against major healthcare providers who were charging more for services to patrons who didn't join the union, or could not afford to.

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hey are pretty ruthless. I doubt you have much recourse other than legal and that cost you way more than what you owe.

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This is pretty much what I figured. Total bullshite. I haven't avoided anything and this probably should have been paid by insurance anyway, but they're not going to get involved now.

Looks like I'm shite outta luck.

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Radiologist has to look at each of those xrays. If you as a consumer could sort through the mountain of charges listed on the chargemaster and predict what would be needed to correct your probably, you could probably come within + or - 5000% of the actual ER bill.

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And yet we used to have health care without all that crap. It's possible. It may not be possible under the current regs but I refuse to believe that + or - 5,000% is the best an industry can do. That's dysfunctional.

Price transparency is really not very relevant, people only think it is because they think prices are a result of costs, but that’s not the case, it’s actually the other way around. Costs are determined by prices. So finding out what it costs providers to produce a product or service wouldn’t tell you that you were being “scammed”. There is no inherent price to health care or drugs. Prices are determined by the supply of and demand for those products and services. That’s not to say we can’t say anything about the current state of health care pricing. Our government policy regarding health care is to artificially restrict supply (eg licensing, patents, etc) and subsidize/artificially increase demand (eg medicare, Medicaid, etc). In other words, if our government’s goal was to increase health care prices, it would look just as it does now. That’s not to say that it’s the government’s goal, they would probably say it was for safety, though the fact that providers and consumers can’t opt out of these interventions if they wished to do so may make one wonder if this is all in good faith or just a government provided privilege for some at the expense of everyone else.