Health care is expensive. If you are convinced that donating blood is a community service and do it for free, the Red Cross sells it for up to $200 per pint. If you need a transfusion, each pint will cost $1,000 and up. That is paid for by insurance. What isn't covered by insurance will be passed along to you in the form of an out-of-pocket cost. If you have a medical emergency and an ambulance you did not request takes you to a hospital outside your network, you could be bankrupt. All due to federal government poiicies that began to create the health care problem in the 1940s and have only added on to it since.

In 2022, the federal government passed the No Surprises Act, prohibiting unexpected or “surprise” bills after patients receive out-of-network medical care. And a new paper shows it did save end users money, $567 per patient. The problem is that money is being taken in other ways, premiums did not go down a penny despite claims that more expensive paperwork would lead to that, and even more regulations without being able to charge more are causing health insurers to collapse.

The authors look at 17,351 adults, who had direct-purchase private insurance, not Obamacare, including 8,204 people in states where the No Surprises Act mandated new billing rules. The savings are clear but the argument used by proponents that convinced both President Trump and the bipartisan Congress of 2020 to pass it was that it would lead to fair payment negotiations between insurers and providers. 

That did not happen. The authors conspiratorially infer that evil "private equity firms" - they have taken the place of the "Big Pharma" that used to be the villain when academics and Democrats hated vaccines and medicine before 2021 - are creating loopholes but reality tells a different story.

If "private equity" - which government made popular by passing Sarbanes-Oxley and declaring a public company CEO who mistakenly signs a document that ends up being false will go to federal prison - was the problem, we wouldn't be seeing this in health care companies:



They are not doing well because even though spending on health care has gone up, premiums are now 400% higher for health insurance on average while most doctors cap the number of Obamacare patients they will accept, and taxpayer spending has continued to rise, but government costs have become obscene.



The largest expense remains all of the new paperwork that government piles on every time they claim they are helping people.



Doctors and hospitals don't want all of those admin people that government has requited in droves starting during the Nixon administration. They do want tort reform, which would allow them to end "defensive medicine" they engage in because predatory lawyers - predatorts - are waiting to sue if they didn't conduct meaningless tests.

That is why 80 percent of neurosurgeons engage in defensive medicine despite their medical judgment - and half of them won't perform any procedure when there is elevated risk at all. Predatort culture enabled by unwilingness to create tort reform means nearly 75 percent of obstetricians and gynecologists get malpractice lawsuits within 15 years of going into practice.

Academics and their political allies rail against health insurers, claiming doctors should be allowed to make decisions, but doctors are not. Government has taken health care away from the medical community.

Rather than demonize "private equity" the way they now do student loans they lobbied to have made unlimited, academics should care about patients more than advancing even more of the problems their tribe created.

Create tort reform. Get it passed. Then consumers will see real savings and patients will receive far better health care - because it won't require meaningless tests to ward off lawyers and testifying before populist politicians on CSPAN.