Charlottesville
June 8, 2023
I received a call from Blue Cross today wanting to confirm I don't have any other medical insurance. They received a claim from UVa Hopital for $221,000 (I rounded down) for my back surgery. Wow! Heck, my cardiac arrest cost much less than that ($70,000).
I have certainly gotten my money's worth from
My medical insurance!
Medical care costs are grossly inflated in the USA. Much higher than anywhere else in the world. We pay for a huge healthcare insurance bureaucracy, a huge hospital group bureaucracy, an army of administrative people to deal with claims. Not to mention numerous government departments at the state and federal level involved with regulating hospitals, administering Medicaid and Medicare, licensing medical care professionals. Few of them provide any contribution to patient care.
Then you have rapacious Big Pharma which sells drugs developed in the USA at a fraction of the cost to US citizens. Essentially US citizens pay the R&D costs and the rest of the world benefits. Plus Big Pharma spends hundreds of millions of dollars advertising prescription dru…