Bitter Pill

Read the feature in the March 4 issue of Time magazine, Steven Brill’s “Bitter Pill: How Outrageous Pricing and Egregious Profits Are Destroying Our Health Care.” It’s long, but it’s worth the reader’s slog, for Brill looks closely at dozens of hospital bills from across the country. What he found were not nonprofit institutions devoted solely to the health of their patients, but profit centers that charge scandalous sums for pills, gauze, ointments and procedures.

How scandalous? A head scan that in Canada costs $122 will bring a U.S. hospital $510. An appendectomy in high-priced Switzerland will cost $5,840, compared to $13,003 in the United States. And a coronary bypass that puts a Frenchman back $16,140 will require $67,583 to get around a U.S. blockage.

According to Brill, the results don’t justify the prices we pay. In 2010, America spent more than $8,000 per person on health care; the Japanese, less than half that much. An American can expect to live to be 79; a resident of Japan, to 83. All the world’s developed countries do as well or better than the United States on the longevity scale, despite the U.S. spending $750 billion more on health care than all the other developed nations spend combined.