If you’ve ever suspected that there are two sets of pricing standards at some hospitals in the United States–one for those with insurance and one for those without–then you won’t be surprised to discover that it is indeed true.
Even though charging patients without insurance more than the insured was made illegal by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), it is still taking place across the country. And one state in particular seems to be overrun with disparities in hospital bills: Florida.
A study released this week shows that while non-profit hospitals are under the ACA mandate when it comes to what they are allowed to charge uninsured patients, for-profit hospitals are still overbilling for services at rates as high as 10 times what the insured pay.
Back to Florida. The Sunshine State is the proud home of many for-profit hospitals which also happen to be located in low income areas of the state. One example is?North Okaloosa Medical Center, where uninsured patients are charged 12.6 times the actual cost of goods or services. That means that a procedure which costs an insured person $1,000 will result in a bill of $12,600 for a person without insurance. Can you say “highway robbery?”
Most of the hospitals in the Top 50 worst offenders category are owned by one of two corporations: Community Health Systems, which operates 25 hospitals, and Hospital Corp of America, which operates 14.
Gerard Anderson, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and one of the co-authors of the study, which appeared in Health Affairs, remarked:
?They are price-gouging because they can. They are marking up the prices because no one is telling them they can’t.?
The good news, if you can indeed call it that, is that on average most hospitals only charge a measly 340 percent more if you don’t have health insurance.
Guess that whole free market theory of economics that Republicans are so fond of touting doesn’t apply to hospitals.
