There is much more that I could write about being in the hospital, but do you really want to read about hospital food and sleep deprivation?  My guess is probably not.  So, let’s talk about something really fun – hospital bills.  OK, maybe it’s not that fun, but it sure is worth talking about.
 There are two sets of bills – those from the medical professionals for their services and those for the hospital for the room, equipment, staffing, medications, laboratory work and so forth.  It would be nice to give you more detail on the exact charges, but the information sent from my insurance company really didn’t provide any specifics.  All I can tell you was that (so far), there were 9 charges from the hospital, and 16 charges from the medical group.  The hospital was reimbursed $1,637 for its services and the medical group was reimbursed $6,269 for its services.  I should hasten to point out that the procedure that I underwent involved seven hours of very technical and sensitive intervention by a team of caregivers.
 Now, as you might imagine, working for the Medical University, I have a range of health insurance options from which to choose.  I participate in our preferred provider plan, MUSC Options, which means that I pay favorable rates for using services within the Medical University system.  It doesn’t mean that the Medical University got a better deal on my care, however.  In fact, the insurance company paid only 36 percent of the hospital charges and 27 percent of the physician charges.
 So, I ask you, how many other businesses are there in which the people who pay for services cover only about a third or less of the sticker price?  Maybe there are some, but I have a hard time thinking of any.  The problem is that this is the good news in health care reimbursement – I had insurance.  About one in five patients have no insurance, and more often than not, the providers of care end up collecting little or no money from these patients.
 If you wanted to design a crazy reimbursement system, you couldn’t do much better than the one that we tolerate in the United States.