Comment by benterix
1 year ago
> The US spends over 17% of GDP on healthcare
It doesn't have to be 17%, it can be an arbitrary number because the ones who decide on the nominal pricing are the ones who make money on them being extremely high. These same procedures can in some cases cost even 2-3 orders of magnitude less - and not in another country but in the same hospital but with a patient willing to pay in cash.
list prices are high to scare Americans into buying [more expensive] insurance plan.
they want Americans be scared of going bankrupt from medical bills.
on the backend, between insurance and hospital, these giant list prices are automatically lowered by factor of 10 to the actual cost of procedure
the business model is: 1. insurance scares people with huge prices 2. healthy americans buy a lot of expensive insurance 3. money is injected into healthcare system from healthy patients 4. money is split among insurance/pbm/providers/pharma