The pro-industry bloggers at DrugWonks have been on a tear, insulting and denigrating Michael Moore and his movie Sicko at any chance they get. (This isn't surprising as the blog is paid for with drug biz money -- Peter Pitts is employed by pr firm Manning Selvage & Lee, where his clients are drug companies.)
The DrugWonks people seem to believe that if they can just remind us enough times that it is ironic that a clinically obese man has made a film about healthcare, that somehow nobody will watch or believe it.
But here is what DrugWonks just doesn't get: Moore gets one thing right -- it is a nightmare being a patient in the American healthcare system.
Yesterday I mentioned that I was trying to schedule an MRI, and that the pricing structure for MRIs at my local hospital (in Hoboken NJ) worked out so that it was cheaper to pretend to have no insurance than it was to use your insurance.
So this morning I made a few phonecalls -- funny how everything in US healthcare revolves around endless phonecalls -- in an attempt to find out what, exactly, my out-of-pocket costs would be if I got this MRI at a different place (Union City NJ). I've had an MRI there before and was only charged $50 in out-of-pocket costs -- on the same insurance plan.
The Union City company told me that they would charge my insurance company, United Healthcare, $600-700. United has previously told me they would cover 90% of the costs after meeting a $250 deductible. So that would mean I might have to pay $295 for a $700 scan.
Those numbers are far different from the ones I cited yesterday at the facility in Hoboken, where I was offered $580 out-of-pocket on a bill of about $2600, or to pay $450 in cash without insurance.
So, I called United to see if they could tell me -- exactly -- how much the charges would be at the Union City site, which seems to be cheaper. After giving all my code numbers and reconfirming my date of birth -- twice -- I spoke to two people who both declined to give me a straight answer. One of them pointed to their website, myuhc.com, where there is a cost estimator. The estimator revealed that my out-of-pocket expenses could be $186.
See how insane this is:
Hoboken: $580
"Uninsured": $450
Union City (less than a mile away): $295
United Healthcare's estimate: $186
But the most infuriating thing was that United declined point blank to tell me what the cost would be. I put it to the woman on the phone that as soon as the MRI people sent them the paperwork, then United would know EXACTLY what my costs would be, and that the company was basically lying to me be saying it "didn't know" what my costs would be.
This process took about an hour. I still have no idea what the charges will be. This is why Americans have come to hate US healthcare -- it's time consuming, complicated, contradictory, expensive, and no one can ever give you a straight answer to a straight question.
And until DrugWonks gets that, all the mud they're throwing at Michael Moore will make them look Antoinette-like: a bunch of guys in suits who don't understand why we don't all just eat the cake.