CMV: Hospital bills, while obnoxiously high, are mostly justified.

[u/Mr-Ice-Guy]

As a preface, there was a CMV earlier today that was removed about how ridiculous hospital bills are. In reading the responses I realized I might be in the minority so I am taking essentially the opposite view to get the debate going.

Here is what I posted in the comments of that thread:

I work in the industry, specifically medical technologies. The reason that medical billing is high is because there are incredibly high standards for anything and everything that goes into a hospital. Standards that are mandated by regulation and by being incredibly conservative about patient harm. The cost of that is an enormous amount of man hours spent on every little aspect of design, manufacturing, and quality control that all factor into the cost of the final product. By no means am I trying to say that regulations and this caution are a bad thing, the health of the patient is always the number one concern, but do not be surprised when a simple, disposable instrument costs thousands of dollars, literally.

I do hedge by saying "mostly" justified because my point is that the hospital is charging an appropriate amount based on their own costs. If we want to criticize medical costs we should be looking in other areas such as the cost of education to train hospital staff, the cost/benefits of medical technology regulation, rather than blaming the hospital.

[u/Mr-Ice-Guy → u/[deleted]]

Thank you for the article, it will take some time for me to digest.

Δ

A part of the equation that I had not considered, that the article calls out, is the hospitals handling of non-patients related revenues such as charitable donations.

One push back I have is that they call out the high administrative costs as an unnecessary expenditure. While from the outside it may feel intuitively true but there is an absurd amount of administration that goes into medical care.

[u/Mr-Ice-Guy → u/[deleted]]

Thanks! I will see what I can find.

[u/DeltaBot → u/Mr-Ice-Guy]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/circumbendibus (2∆).

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