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To: Saturn V who wrote (179479)	9/28/2004 1:06:58 AM
From: Don Lloyd	Respond to of 186894

Saturn, I was happy, but the bottom line is that if I did not have Insurance I would have paid the ridiculous figure of $70k. Blue Cross and Medicare are subsidized by the uninsured ! . A few friends of mine had similar experiences. Wall Street Jornal carried a story last week showing that this practice of the uninsured populace subsisiding health cares costs is commonplace across most hospitals. I think that a better interpretation is that a high degree of insurance coverage, priced at high discounts to list prices, is itself what drives up the list prices charged to uninsured patients. This is true of drug prices as well as of health insurance in general. If enough of a drug company's revenue comes from insurance contracts, the company can only serve its own interest by raising list prices. A rise in list price will reduce uninsured list price revenue by less than the increase in insured discounted revenue. Thus the pricing of most medical and health items has a high level of built-in inflation and will end up higher than mere monopoly suppliers would price. When all medical supplies are under insurance, the discounted prices would either end up the same as if there were no discounts at all (everybody getting a discount is the same as nobody getting a discount) or prices will be entirely controlled. Regards, Don