>>>Last year I went to the emergency room with chest pains... had a heart cath done... No blockage... released me that afternoon. The hospital bill was $35,000.00 !
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>>>I decided that that left leg that kept going numb and I was having to drag was going to need some medical help... turns out that the doc decided I need a fusion of L3,L4 and L5... the hospital bill for the one week was $100,000.00...
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>>>The next time I have to go to the hospital, I'm just going to book a room at the best hotel in town and order room service and save several thousand!
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>All the evidence agrees with you that your bill would have been far less in most other first-world nations for an equivalent result. However, trouble is that healthcare funding is like medicine itself: the more you know, the more you realize you don't know.
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>For example: a paper published last week reports that the cost for US physician practices to interact with payers last year, was $82,975 per physician. Calculate how many fusions a spinal surgeon might perform per year and consider what the markup would have to be on your bill to cover your share of this admin cost. Also consider that nurses and medical assistants spent 20.6 hours per physician per week on payer admin requirements which is more than ten times as long as their colleagues in Canada. Prior authorizations, such as that for your back operation, by themselves accounted for 13.1 hours per physician per week. If these US costs could be reduced to their equivalent in Canada, the saving from this alone would be $27billion per year.
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>At the risk of seeming provocative, check this out: http://notunlikeresearch.typepad.com/something-not-unlike-rese/2011/08/social-democracy-leads-to-economic-catastrophe-right.html
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>;-)


Well, it's not going to get fixed quickly, unless they make me king, and I don't think that will happen unless I can get in touch with the Rothschilds and they refuse to answer my telekenetic queries....