Steven Brill’s longform piece in Time on the high cost of health care is getting a lot of attention from policy wonks. I know what you’re thinking. Time? Isn’t this the same magazine that runs cover stories on pressing topics like Jesus’ favorite snack foods? Someone in the magazine’s upper echelons must still care about old-fashioned investigative journalism because the piece itself is quite good. It begins by looking at the exorbitant medical bills incurred by people with little or no insurance. In Brill’s quest to understand why people with the least amount of coverage are forced to pay the most outrageous prices for care, he examines the major players in the health care ecosystem: the non-profit hospitals that really aren’t non-profit, the medical device and pharmaceutical companies that can generate huge profit margins by charging whatever they like for their products, and a federal government that is legally prevented from negotiating prices that could make health care far less costly.
None of this is exactly news to those of us in health care policy circles, but the article is excellent at illustrating just how dysfunctional the health care marketplace has become. It also reminds us that the process of reforming our health care system didn’t end with the passage of the Affordable Care Act.
