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Healthcare costs are too variable

 

Re the Jan. 23 article, Hospitals face huge funding cuts: The catch-22 of healthcare costs is that hospitals are unable to accurately price their procedures because they are obliged by law to accept the medically needy who cannot pay. For that reason, they must factor in that needy portion and accurate medical pricing is therefore a crap shoot. One could argue that Obamacare would remove this variable factor of unpaid bills by requiring all of us to be insured.

If a hospital’s exposure to cover those unable to pay were covered by insurance, then we could begin to see competition in the marketplace of medical procedures: hip/knee replacements, gall bladder procedures and appendectomies at fixed prices. Instead we get a mish-mash of political compromise that castrates any hope of accountable medical costs.

Robert Dollar, Miami

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