From what I can see there is a cost breakdown in the article, but a deeper breakdown would help make sense of these things.
If the hospital has to pay for administrative staff, nurses, doctors, maintenance, electricity, etc. and then deliver a profit to the owner. Is this profiteering or just costs that are passed on to the patient? If it's the latter, then why are those costs high, and so on until something looks disproportionately expensive.
Is it that hospitals are pricing treatment because of having to comply with some expensive regulatory requirement? Or is it that doctors are paid an incredibly high wage compared to doctors in other parts of the world? Or is it that insurance paperwork requires a large administrative staff?
I suspect there is no single answer to these questions, and that there is some complex set of reasons why costs are high.
If it's just profiteering, then the solution is to get stitches from elsewhere. A vet or a nurse or EMT can probably do it freelance too.
Prices in medical care like anything else is a function of the maximum amount of money that can be extracted.
With the socialized Medicare/Medicaid already in place, hospitals charge as much as they can knowing the government has deep pockets, will pay, and will give minimal resistance.
Those high prices are then charged to insurance companies as well through closed door, complex negotiations on a case by case basis - super inefficient and expensive.
Also without consumers in the loop even caring what their insurance company is paying, and no price transparency in general, there is no pressure to decrease prices, improve quality or compete in general which are the cornerstones of free market economics.
Luckily price transparency laws were passed last year and are still working their way through the system so hopefully people will start to get a taste of what’s possible soon and decide to take those laws even further.
From what I can see there is a cost breakdown in the article, but a deeper breakdown would help make sense of these things.
If the hospital has to pay for administrative staff, nurses, doctors, maintenance, electricity, etc. and then deliver a profit to the owner. Is this profiteering or just costs that are passed on to the patient? If it's the latter, then why are those costs high, and so on until something looks disproportionately expensive.
Is it that hospitals are pricing treatment because of having to comply with some expensive regulatory requirement? Or is it that doctors are paid an incredibly high wage compared to doctors in other parts of the world? Or is it that insurance paperwork requires a large administrative staff?
I suspect there is no single answer to these questions, and that there is some complex set of reasons why costs are high.
If it's just profiteering, then the solution is to get stitches from elsewhere. A vet or a nurse or EMT can probably do it freelance too.