Nick Der retweetledi

The American healthcare system may be the only industry in the country where you can consume a service without ever being told the price beforehand, then receive a bill weeks later that looks like a ransom note assembled by a cartel of accountants and insurance executives. Imagine taking your car to a mechanic, ordering dinner at a restaurant, or hiring a contractor to renovate your kitchen only to be told: “We can’t give you the price until after the work is done because we need to negotiate it with a third party behind closed doors.” People would laugh you out of business. Yet in medicine, this absurdity has been normalized to the point that citizens barely question it anymore.
What makes it even more insane is that the actual customer, the patient, is often completely removed from the transaction itself. Instead of transparent pricing between provider and consumer, healthcare routes everything through an opaque middleman system involving insurers, hospital networks, pharmaceutical benefit managers, and government reimbursement formulas that almost nobody understands, including many doctors. The result is a market where prices are effectively fictional.
One patient gets billed $400 for a procedure, another gets billed $40,000 for the exact same thing, depending on what labyrinthine insurance contracts exist behind the scenes. Hospitals post absurd sticker prices knowing insurers will “negotiate them down,” while uninsured people are left holding the inflated bag. It’s less a functioning market than a Byzantine shell game designed to obscure accountability at every level.
In short, it is corrupt to the core and plays games with the most important thing people possess: their lives.
English

























