Remember that one friend you had in high school who would always mosey up to your locker between classes, just to tell you with smug assurance that Jersey Shore is scripted and that artificial sweeteners give you cancer? OK, maybe those are highly regional and time-specific talking points, but regardless, we all knew these kinds of pests. Normally they spewed complete nonsense with the sole aim to get a rise out of us, and it was easy to ignore them with this in mind. But what if these people actually knew what they were talking about, and they wielded their knowledge like a hammer to smash all our preconceived notions about the world and send us into a tailspin of annoyance and horror?
Cue the newest episode of Adam Ruins Everything, the former YouTube series turned truTV show in which comedian Adam Conover debunks popular myths that permeate our culture. In his newest episode, “The Real Reason Hospitals Are So Expensive,” Conover talks to a patient named Rachel, shining a light on the American healthcare system and exposing the obscene up-charges that threaten to bankrupt so many sick, uninsured Americans.
Some key points from the video include:
- Hospitals use a Chargemaster to assign arbitrary, ridiculously inflated prices to various common medical objects. That’s why a $20 neck brace costs $154, or an IV bag that should cost pennies can run for $137.
- Blame these charges on insurance companies, who demand massive discounts from hospitals for sending thousands of patients their way. Hospitals still need to make a profit, so they inflate their prices and give insurance companies a discount off those figures.
- Even insured Americans aren’t always safe from these prices. If you go to a hospital, see a doctor, or use equipment that’s “out of network,” you still absorb the full cost of your care—and every hospital has its own Chargemaster to rip patients off as they see fit. As Conover puts it: “You can’t comparison shop when you’re dying!”
- Even if you stay within your network, your insurance company’s inflated costs can trickle down to you in the form of higher premiums.
- The healthcare industry spends more money on lobbying than the oil and defense industries combined. Yay!
- We have to go to the hospital, so there’s really no way around this. “Politicians have spent decades arguing over how to pay the bill instead of asking why the bill is so high,” Conover says. “Until they do, we’re stuck with this system.”
The American healthcare system is tremendously complex and obviously can’t be fully explained in a five-minute video, but Conover exposes a lot of the widely accepted falsehoods about hospitals and insurance companies. By the end of the video, Rachel decides that if she’s getting ripped off, she might as well get as much bang for her buck as possible. She marches into that doctor’s office determined to score some antibiotics.
“Even if it means the end of modern medicine?” Conover pipes up. But that’s an issue for another video.