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How to make money out of COVID in the USA.

Be thankful of the NHS.

From the NYT.

What’s behind those surprise medical bills

Congress tried in coronavirus relief packages passed this spring to shield Covid-19 patients from unexpected medical charges — and yet many patients continue to receive heartstoppingly large bills that their insurance companies won’t cover.

One patient in Philadelphia was flown between hospitals by helicopter while she was unconscious and returned home weeks later to a $52,112 bill from the air ambulance company. Another faces as much as $4,000 in medical debt after spending 10 days at an in-network hospital in Austin, Texas, because many of the doctors at the hospital were out-of-network.

Our colleague Sarah Kliff told us that patients were often charged fees by providers or companies that they didn’t choose or even realized were involved in their care. A big reason for these exorbitant charges, she said, is private equity.

Take the helicopter ride, for example. Private-equity firms have poured money into air ambulance companies after courts exempted air ambulances from any state price regulation.

“From a private equity point of view, it’s actually an amazing investment,” Sarah told us. “Prices that can go as high as you want, plus customers who can’t negotiate those prices. Like, if you need an air ambulance, you need an air ambulance, and you can’t call someone else and you can’t negotiate.”

Sarah told us that private-equity money was flowing into these areas of health care where patients have little or no say, including emergency room doctors and anesthesiologists. Firms buy the companies that staff doctors in hospitals, and then they raise prices or go out-of-network.

Last year, a plan to ban these surprise bills was popular, bipartisan and backed by the White House. But it fell apart at the last minute after the private-equity firms that own many medical providers poured millions into advertisements opposing the plan.

 

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