If they charged 2-cent, government programs would pay 1-cent. If they charged $300 for the MRI, they would receive $12. They mark-up to account for being shorted. The government does not allow the market to work, therefore there need to be adjustments to account for that.
Took my wife to the ER last week because the Urgent Care was closed and she needed a strep test. I wasn't happy to pay the $250 copay but I didn't think it was unfair either. $250 for a trip to the ER is a bargain, IMO. My father in law, also a physician, could not diagnose without the test so he sent us somewhere that had the tools to do so. It takes specialized knowledge and very expensive tools to do something as simple as diagnosing strep. We could expect that it just be given to us because of it's mere existence or we could recognize that physicians spent a lot of time and personal capital to gain that knowledge and the hospital spends a ton of money to operate and offer that diagnosis to us. Within a half hour of leaving the hospital, we got a phone call to say that it did not show up as strep but would find out for sure when the culture came back. How expensive do you think it was to do a culture sample that had to be transported from our small town hospital?
We paid $9 for thirty amoxicillan. I paid more at the grocery store for each of the five other individual non-prescription medicines to help her along.
I expect our insurance premium to go up by as much as 30% just next year and I fully intend to pay that premium to keep our great insurance and access to the best doctors my area has to offer. What could be more important? I don't think I can afford to put my family on government scrutinized care. I'd rather have a profit-seeking company trying to keep me as their customer than a bureaucrat using a Cost Benefit Analysis to determine my care.
The government can regulate minimum standards of health provision as they have done and the costs will be high for compliance and improved health standards as private providers do what they must to provide the best care and be profitable. Or the government can regulate costs and standards and get inefficiency in both as private providers cannot do both for free. The government will then claim a market failure, gov't caused, and take over health care entirely. We then end up with substandard care and high costs unevenly distributed through taxes.
If you want VA-level care, the kind provided to our most deserving of Americans, you'll soon get it without having to join the military. Sure, it may be cheap. As with most things in life, you get what you pay for. My father-in-law quit working with the VA when the first contract with them ended. He said it paid well but the practice of medicine was nearly the last concern and he didn't become a physician to fill out paperwork. He would have remained a pharmacist (something else he did for a year) if he did.
