Health

"It has been common for hospitals to raise their chargemaster rates substantially each year in an effort to win higher reimbursement rates from health insurers. But the practice falls hard on uninsured patients, because most hospitals give no more than a 20-percent discount to the uninsured."

"California is a unique state in that all hospitals are required to submit a copy of their chargemasters, which the state then posts online for all consumers and patients to see."

"Bills that include chargemaster prices are not a true reflection of actual price and if paid at the chargemaster list price would yield extremely large profits for the hospital. (50) It can be argued that because hospitals accept different payments from different payers for identical services, hospitals engage in price discrimination--the practice of charging different customers different prices for identical goods or services."

"These gross prices are listed on spreadsheets called chargemasters, and are typically used as a starting point in negotiations over fees in much the same way the sticker price of a car is the initial bargaining point at an auto dealership. The chargemaster prices are typically negotiated downward to reasonable reimbursement rates for private insurers and public programs such as Medi-Cal and Medicare, according to the suit. Not so for uninsured patients of Sutter hospitals , who are billed the full sticker price, which can be 80 percent higher than the industry standard, according to the suit."

"[] Staff views it as inappropriate for a hospital to seek payment from a patient by sending a bill, (and) when payment is not received, to seek to recharacterize that debt as charity care. In addition, staff has found that the decision by some hospitals to include bad debt which often consists of very high charges from the (chargemaster list) provides a misleading and inflated accounting of a hospital 's charity care to policymakers and the public."

"Perhaps worst of all, billed charges can be perceived as shocking, or even punitive, to the uninsured. As hospitals increasingly raised their charges and set prices by negotiating discounts from their chargemasters, those with the least bargaining power received the smallest discounts. An unfortunate consequence of this system is that self-payers, including the uninsured, were usually forced to accept the charges that hospitals stipulated. This created, probably inadvertently, a rather pernicious outcome in which patients who had the least ability to pay for their health care were charged the highest prices. This has resulted in considerable problems for some patients with very high health care personal debt, aggressive efforts at collection, and avoidance of needed services."

"Hospitals readily admit that chargemaster prices are inflated. That's because they are the starting point for negotiating the discounts given to private insurance plans in return for the volume of patients they send to a hospital. Those bloated chargemaster prices, however, are the numbers used to bill uninsured patients - many of whom will struggle to pay those bills and will get nasty collection letters if they don't."

"The Sisneros suit is a counterclaim to a civil case filed by ENMMC against him, for failure to pay a $12,730 hospital bill for treatment. The counterclaim accuses the hospital of inflating its chargemaster rates, or the standard costs for any given procedure, in an effort to engage in 'turbocharging'."

"Much ink has been spilt bemoaning that incomprehensible foundation of hospital cost accounting and prices, the redoubtable chargemaster."

"There are no current measures in ObamaCare that will help Medicare and the private market gain better transparency on the "chargemaster" of hospitals and until this happens, there are many hospital executives who will continue to bring in enormous salaries at the expense of the market and consumers."

"Several hospitals have made initial, defensible pricing investments to eliminate the most egregious perceived offenses--e.g., the $100 aspirin--item from their chargemasters. However, few hospitals have designed or adopted a charge-code-by-charge-code pricing methodology that is auditable, logical, and defensible."

"In addition to patients without insurance, hospitals also charged international visitors and patients with health plans through insurers that haven't negotiated hospital discounts approximately two and a half times the price offered to health insurers with discounts, the report estimates. These inflated bills base their prices on a hospital's chargemaster file, an undiscounted master list of the prices hospitals set for services."

"Hospitals use a chargemaster to list the items involved in procedures performed at the hospital. A chargemaster contains the prices of all services, goods, and procedures for which a separate charge exists and is used to generate a patient's bill. Chargemaster information has traditionally been kept proprietary, but California via the Payers Bill of Rights has recently made its chargemaster available to the public."

"Do you have any idea how much your hospital laboratory charges for an outpatient urinalysis? I didn't until recently, when my daughter showed me a copy of the bill my hospital was sending to her insurer. The charge for urinalysis, culture, and sensitivities was $491. When I ordered a follow-up a week later, it was $273. How could that be? This inquiry about one urine test is symbolic. There are 20,000 items in the hospital's Chargemaster computer billing program. This massive list comprises the healthcare problem in America. In light of this, I decided to spend time as an amateur economist. The first question I asked: Where is the hospital lee schedule published? Not on the hospital website."

"Handing consumers hospital chargemasters to help them 'shop' for the best deal is about as useful as handing them a scalpel and telling them to perform their own bypass surgery. Yet, the state of California in 2003 enacted a law requiring all hospitals to make their chargemasters publicly available."

"The higher the chargemaster markup over cost, the greater the potential for profit."

"However, I quickly found that although every hospital has a chargemaster, officials treat it as if it were an eccentric uncle living in the attic. Whenever I asked, they deflected all conversation away from it. They even argued that it is irrelevant. I soon found that they have good reason to hope that outsiders pay no attention to the chargemaster or the process that produces it. For there seems to be no process, no rationale, behind the core document that is the basis for hundreds of billions of dollars in health care bills."

"To put it simply, the chargemaster system on which hospitals rely to set pricing and billing codes has a forty-year history of changes that has distorted the relationship between price and cost."

"Chargemasters contain laughably high prices that hospital administrators don’t even try to justify. (They don’t seem to know how they were set to begin with, and argue that they’re misleading because insurance companies always negotiate lower ones.) Yet people without insurance, or with too little insurance, often end up paying chargemaster prices."

"JPS doesn't publicize its costs or charges. Its chargemaster, which lists prices for thousands of different services, is public information for anyone requesting it. But chargemasters are written in codes that are hard to understand. And it wouldn't provide a comparison of prices of another hospital."

"I wish it were possible...to invent a method of embalming drowned persons, in such a manner that they might be recalled to life at any period, however distant; for having a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to an ordinary death, being immersed with a few friends in a cask of Madeira, until that time, then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country! But... in all probability, we live in a century too little advanced, and too near the infancy of science, to see such an art brought in our time to its perfection..."

"If cryonics were a scam it would have far better marketing and be far more popular."

"Tantalisingly, later next century and beyond, our transhuman descendants may well enjoy lifelong (super-)happiness and quasi-eternal youth. By contrast, most if not all early twenty-first century humans are destined to crumble away and perish. If implemented, however, a stopgap regime of opt-out cryonics, and opt-in cryothanasia, can potentially defang death for secular rationalists, and even offer a backup insurance policy for religious believers. Therefore political lobbying for regulatory change should be a priority. If successful, then visiting absent loved ones in the cryonics tank can become the norm rather than the exception."

"They're very much like people in a long-term coma, except there is no metabolism. They're not alive, but they're not dead. In our view, dying is a process, and Cryonics stops that process and puts it on pause, and lets you go into the future where we have greater capabilities to reverse that and bring you back to life. Around -100°C, the body becomes a true solid, so it does not matter if you wait a day or 100 years, you will be the same as when you started."

"We’ll look back on this 50 to 100 years from now — we’ll shake our heads and say, “What were people thinking? They took these people who were very nearly viable, just barely dysfunctional, and they put them in an oven or buried them under the ground, when there were people who could have put them into cryopreservation." I think we’ll look at this just as we look today at slavery, beating women, and human sacrifice, and we’ll say, “this was insane — a huge tragedy.""

"Cryonics is the second worst thing that can happen to you."

"I feel pleased with the rate of progress of interest in life-extension that is now developing. I am more concerned about the rate of growth of interest in cryonics — since this is the "first aid" which may be necessary for some of us to reach the time when biological aging is no longer a part of normal human life. The decision to include cryonics in a program of life extension requires a great stride beyond the more usual methods of safe and health-conscious living. Cryonics may be an advanced form of medicine that can greatly extend lifespan. Cryonics is not anti-religious or a means to prevent ultimate death. I hope that those who deeply care about their lives and the lives of their loved-ones will increasingly learn to be open to the life-saving potential of cryonics and other practical strategies for survival — and not be distracted by fantasies of physical immortality."

"Cryonics is a legitimate science-based endeavor that seeks to preserve human beings, especially the human brain, by the best technology available. Future technologies for resuscitation can be envisioned that involve molecular repair by nanomedicine, highly advanced computation, detailed control of cell growth, and tissue regeneration. With a view toward these developments, there is a credible possibility that cryonics performed under the best conditions achievable today can preserve sufficient neurological information to permit eventual restoration of a person to full health. The rights of people who choose cryonics are important, and should be respected."

"Cryonics might be a suitable subject for scientific research, but marketing an unproven method to the public is quackery."

"The act of freezing a dead body and storing it indefinitely on the chance that some future generation may restore it to life is an act of faith, not science."

"Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch'd from, The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer, This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds."

"Will you touch, will you mend me Christ? Won't you touch, will you heal me Christ?"

"What heart touched is what is touched what heart experienced is what is experienced where heart lived is what is lived."

"And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers Is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns."

"I’ve touched some sentences and have kissed some words."

"In the course of some experiments I conducted from 1954 through 1956 I was suspended in water for several hours at a time, and I noticed that my skin gradually became more and more sensitive to tactile stimuli and an intense sense of pleasure resulted. However, if the stimulation was carried too far it became intensely irritating, I reasoned that the dolphin is suspended in water all of his life, twenty four hours a day, and possibly had developed an intensely sensitive skin."

"It was a great thing to bring a dead body back to life, but it is a greater miracle to bring a soul dead in sin back to life. My friends have you ever felt the touch of this Jesus? Oh! that we all might feel His touch, that we might look and be healed and live."

"Μή μου ἅπτου, οὔπω γὰρ ἀναβέβηκα πρὸς τὸν πατέρα· πορεύου δὲ πρὸς τοὺς ἀδελφούς μου καὶ εἰπὲ αὐτοῖς· Ἀναβαίνω πρὸς τὸν πατέρα μου καὶ πατέρα ὑμῶν καὶ θεόν μου καὶ θεὸν ὑμῶν."

"Science and mathematics Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it, They never touch it: consider what an explosion Would rock the bones of men into little white fragments and unsky the world If any mind for a moment touch truth."

"She seems to have an invisible touch, yeah She reaches in, and grabs right hold of your heart. She seems to have an invisible touch, yeah It takes control and slowly tears you apart."

"I act creatively and consciously to actively endorse and encourage the expansion of those whose lives I touch. Believing in the goodness of each, I add to the goodness of all. We bless each other even in passing."

"All that I touch, I leave in love. I move through this world consciously and creatively."

"See how the flower leans instinctively Toward the light. See how the heart reaches out instinctively For no reason but to touch…"

"I only want to touch. But I must stay and find a way To stop before it gets too much! All my barriers are going. It's starting to show."

"I'm dying for you just to touch me, And feel all the energy rushing right up-a-me. L'amour looks something like you."

"Touch me, hold me. How my open arms ache! Try to fall for me."

"O Maruts holding Barhiṣa (ritual grass)! What medicine is in Sindhu, in Asiknī, in the Seas, and the Mountains? Finding them, please bring them with you. Please help us to cure the afflicted and make what has gone wrong in them, right again!"

"But nothing is more estimable than a physician who, having studied nature from his youth, knows the properties of the human body, the diseases which assail it, the remedies which will benefit it, exercises his art with caution, and pays equal attention to the rich and the poor."

"Ægrescitque medendo."

"He (Tiberius) was wont to mock at the arts of physicians, and at those who, after thirty years of age, needed counsel as to what was good or bad for their bodies."