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How Much Does an MRI Cost In California: $255? $973.25? $2,925?

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By JEANNE PINDER 

Jeanne PinderEarly results from our California crowdsourcing project on MRI prices are in. Payments range from $255 to $2,925.15. MRI pricing is a complete mystery: What should you pay? Can you ask for a discount? We’ve been looking at health-care prices for three years, so if we say it’s a mystery, we can imagine what it looks like to you.

How much should you pay? Well, one person was told the price is $1,850, but if you pay up front, you can save almost $1,300.

The note on our form, shared by our community member: “I was told procedure would be 1850. I have a 7500 deductible. So I talked to the office mgr who said if I paid upfront and agreed not to report the procedure to Blue Cross, that it would be $580.”

On our Facebook page, one contributor wrote, “I was going to be billed $830 through my PPO for an MRI. The cash price? $500.”

This is the second part of our crowdsourcing project in California with KQED public radio in San Francisco and KPCC/Southern California Public Radio in Los Angeles. We have been asking people to share pricing information for MRI’s, especially of the back; last month we collected mammogram pricing.

A note: We are often asked in this crowdsourcing prototype project if we believe what we are being told by people who fill out our online form at the PriceCheck page. The answer: yes, we do. Though some of our community members have said their bills are confusing, or the coding they see on the bills doesn’t match what we’re collecting, we believe our contributors’ shares. We have seen wide variations in health-care pricing.

So: here are early results.

Lower-back MRI: $255? $602.85? $973.25? $1,660?

Eight identical MRI’s, and eight vastly different payments.

No. 1: We heard from one Kaiser member, who received an MRI of the lower back, without contrast or dye (CPT code 72148) at the Kaiser Antioch Medical Center on Sand Creek Road in Antioch, Calif. This person was charged $973.25 and paid $973.25; insurance paid nothing.Comment: “This price was the contracted amount through my insurance. Deductible had not been met so I was responsible for all charges. This does not include the two office visits required to obtain and analyze the results.”

No. 2: Same kind of MRI, code 72148, at Radnet Medical Imaging at 3440 California St. in San Francisco. This person was charged $1,660 and paid $1,660, out of HSA funds. (Note: Our ClearHealthCosts pricing survey included that Radnet location, and they did tell our survey agent that their cash price is $1,660.)

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Obamacare In Pictures

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By J.D. KLEINKE

A seasoned colleague recently told me that some PowerPoint presentations have no power and make no point.

But sometimes, a picture really is worth a thousand words. Or maybe — in the case of any meaningful discussion of health reform, thanks to its density and complexity — it might be worth 10,000 words. Hence our handy little exhibit.

This picture captures the 10,000 words it would require to explain with technical precision where President Obama’s Affordable Care Act fits relative to all health reform plans. It places “ObamaCare” along an ideologically scaled continuum of all serious reform options developed, debated and discarded or ignored since the 1980s.

They are all here: from the single-payer, centrally controlled models popular with those who detest corporations and the influence of money in medicine — two actual, not imagined “government takeovers of health care” — to two free market, laissez-faire models favored by those who detest regulation and the heavy hand of government in medicine.

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Single Payer Health: It’s Only Fair

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By SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS

The United States is the only major nation in the industrialized world that does not guarantee health care as a right to its people. Meanwhile, we spend about twice as much per capita on health care and, in a wide number of instances, our outcomes are not as good as others that spend far less.

It is time that we bring about a fundamental transformation of the American health-care system. It is time for us to end private, for-profit participation in delivering basic coverage. It is time for the United States to provide a Medicare-for-all, single payer health coverage program.

Under our dysfunctional system, 45,000 Americans a year die because they delay seeking care they cannot afford. We spent 17.6% of our GDP on health care in 2009, which is projected to go up to 20% by 2020, yet we still rank 26th among major, developed nations on life expectancy, and 31st on infant mortality. We must demand a better model of health coverage that emphasizes preventive and primary care for every single person without regard for their ability to pay.

It is certainly a step forward that the new health reform law is projected to cover 32 million additional Americans, out of the more than 50 million uninsured today. Yet projections suggest that roughly 23 million will still be without insurance in 2019, while health-care costs will continue to skyrocket.Continue reading…

Health Care and Constitutional Chaos

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By Eric Segall & Aaron E. Carroll

The Supreme Court’s decision on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will likely be handed down on the last day of this year’s term. If the Court finds that the ACA—either in whole or in part—violates the Constitution, the health care industry will be shaken to its core. And, no matter what legal justification the Court uses to invalidate the ACA, the structure of constitutional law will be severely undercut. The resulting medical and legal chaos will be expensive, divisive, and completely unnecessary. Nothing in the text, history or structure of the Constitution warrants the Court overturning Congress’s effort to address our national health care problems.

For the health care industry, a decision striking down the entire ACA would be an absolute disaster. Physicians, hospitals, and private companies have been shifting how they practice medicine in anticipation of the ACA’s implementation. They’ve been creating accountable care organizations,[1] envisioning a significant reduction in uncompensated care, and enjoying increased Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement in primary care settings.[2] That will all vanish if the ACA is struck down. Moreover, seniors will pay more for prescription drugs and young adults will be taken off their parents’ insurance. The private insurance industry, which has seen its market shrink significantly over the last decade,[3] will see a real chance to reverse that trend disappear. According to one estimate, if the ACA is overturned, insurers may lose over $1 trillion in revenues between 2013 and 2020.[4]

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Inconvenient Facts (For Both Republicans and Democrats)

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By ROBERT LASZEWSKI

I call your attention to Ezra Klein’s column in the Washington Post this morning.

In it he cites data that has been out there for a long time but Ezra puts some perspective on it that never occurred to me before.

Examining the Kaiser Family Foundation brief, “Health Care Spending in the United States and Selected OECD Countries” he points out, “Our government spends more [as a percentage of GDP] on health care than the governments of Japan, Australia, Norway, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Canada, or Switzerland.”

The data would seem to indicate that even our single payer government-run American health care programs, Medicare and Medicaid, cost way more than similar health plans in these nations.

The argument is often made that we should adopt a single payer—or perhaps a “public option”—health plan in the United States in order to control costs and cover everyone. But it would appear that even those programs in America are way too expensive when compared to similar programs in other industrialized nations.

As for the Republican market-based approach, Klein also points out that those programs have been ineffective at cost control. House Republican Paul Ryan often cites the Medicare Part D drug benefit as proof his proposals to privatize Medicare would work better than what we have. But as Klein points out, Part D premiums have risen 57% since 2006 and the program is on track to see nearly 10% growth in annual costs over the next decade.Continue reading…

Single Payer in Vermont? Well, Not Exactly

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By ROGER COLLIER

In just a few days, Vermont’s Governor Peter Shumlin will sign into law what the media is calling “single payer health care reform.” But is it?

Vermont has certainly demonstrated more enthusiasm for a single payer approach than any other state. The Governor and key Democratic legislators have supported the concept, the state has a well-organized lobbying group in Vermont for Single Payer, and a state-funded study earlier this year estimated that a single payer approach could dramatically reduce health care costs. The major result has been passage in the past month by both of the state’s legislative chambers of the bill that Governor Shumlin indicates that he will sign.

So does this mean that Vermont is ready to upend its existing health care financing system and replace it with a French or British-style system? Not exactly.

The versions of the bill passed by Vermont’s House and Senate are each far, far more tentative than committed single payer advocates would wish, and have already been subject to scathing criticism by national single payer advocates. The bill provides for the creation of the legal framework of a public insurance program, to be called Green Mountain Care, but includes no funding mechanism, defines no benefit standards, is vague on the future roles of private insurers, and is silent on exactly how existing federal programs are to be incorporated.

What the bill does do is to establish the state exchange required by the Accountable Care Act, encourage experimental capitated payment structures, and create a Board for Green Mountain Care with responsibility for examining funding, benefit, and other issues, with recommendations to be submitted to the state legislature in 2013.Continue reading…