Following the health-care money
When a hospital charges you $1.50 for a Tylenol pill—which a consumer can buy for 1.5 cents— you may shrug and figure you just don’t understand the system.
But Steven Brill’s cover story in Time magazine shows that the 10,000 percent markup on Tylenol is just a hint of the vast price-gouging that goes on in hospital billing.
Brill drills down into a series of hospital bills and discovers that hospitals routinely charge three and four times what a product or service actually costs. Hospital prices are governed by a shadowy price list known as the “chargemaster,” which sets an arbitrary price designed to maximize profit.
