Just how screwed up is the US medical system?

Let me count the ways.

Here are three recent stories that highlight what's wrong with our medical system.

An in-depth report by the Tampa Bay Times found that hospitals in Florida are charging exorbitant fees for patients arriving at trauma centers. It led with an account of a patient who spent 40 minutes in a Fort Pierce trauma center before being transferred to another institution for a higher level of care. After some diagnostic tests were done, he was on his way. The tab for the 40 minutes? $32,727.

The Times found that the average charge for a trauma center activation was over $10,000 and the highest was $33,000. For-profit hospitals tended to charge the most. These charges were billed regardless of nature of the injuries, be they minor cuts or abrasions. And as is customary today, the uninsured were charged the full amounts.

Hospital administrators admitted that the charges were based on what other hospitals charged and had no relationship to what resources were used. The fees did not include bills for physician services, which were separate.

An ACA fail: One family's saga

The following was written by my daughter, who has a master's degree and should be an ideal candidate for the new world of healthcare coverage.

The Affordable Care Act should benefit people like me. My husband is self-employed, and we have been paying for our own insurance for years now. I looked forward to the ACA marketplace opening up, and hoped that it would provide us with some options for lower-cost insurance. This was especially true after I found out that for our current plan, with a $10,000 family deductible, the premium was going up to $550 per month for 2014, with the addition of our new baby and the expected annual increase.

Searching the ACA website for my state, AccessHealthCT.com, I was happy to see that we qualified for a federal subsidy of $700 per month, and with that, there was an option for what seemed like a similar plan to what we have now. I selected the plan with Anthem BCBS that had a monthly premium of $298.61, with a family deductible of $12,600. This meant we could keep our HSA, and possibly save a lot of money for the year if we did not meet our deductible.

I spent 45 minutes filling out the application, and almost immediately received a letter from Access Health CT saying I had successfully enrolled in the plan I chose, although it did not list the premium on that letter. Ten days later, I had received nothing from Anthem so I called them. I waited an hour to talk to a human, who said yes I was enrolled and just had to pay the first month premium to complete the sign up. 

I would have done this, except that the amount I was told to pay was $2480.46, for the first month and for each month after that. But wait, I said, the premium was listed as $298.61 per month after the subsidy was accounted for. She said the $2480.46 was the amount due from me, having already accounted for the $700 assistance from the federal government. It’s interesting to note that the subsidy amount came through correctly even though my premium was now eight times higher. She said I would have to call Access Health CT to find out what went wrong with the premium.