youbet
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I'm not sure you can believe them. You have to factor in the salaries that everyone is making. If the head of the hospital is making $1 million a year then it might appear that the net profits are not that high, but there may be a lot of people making a great deal of money. Read the article in Time about some of the salaries.
Excellent points.
While I want to believe that the Midpack chart points irrevocably to Big Pharma and the med equipment providers as the guilty culprits, because the chart is in percentages, it leaves the question open. It would be handy to know how the absolute quantity of profit dollars of Big Pharma compare to the total health care cost outlay in the USA today. The guilt may still be there, but we don't know from the percentage charts.
I also wonder how the non-profit status of many of the providers effects the numbers. Or how about tax supported providers? I wonder if perhaps a non-profit provider's revenue is nicely above costs, do they still count as "zero profit" for this set of data? That is, a hospital that would be making a nice profit as a private, for profit organization might have the same numbers counted as zero profit if they have non-profit status?
I'm not a fan of Big Pharma or of med equipment manufacturers, but I'm also not a fan of providers since their billing schemes seem arbitrary and aimed at bilking the system. It's doubtful readily obtainable numbers will ever point accurately to the real villians.
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