Say Anything Blog

Over on the reader blog Doug Leier is wondering if he can get his co-pay back after the hospital misdiagnosed his illness.

I’ve been battling what turned out to be double lung infection not influenza like first diagnosed in a previous post. So would I be out of line for asking for my co-pay back from the first visit?

If i took my car in and they said it was a flat tire when in fact the car was out of gas would they make me pay to fix a flat tire that wasn’t flat?

No, they wouldn’t.  But then tire shops operate in a totally free market.  Or, at least, one that is more free than hospitals and doctors operate in.

See, most of us aren’t responsible for paying the vast majority of our health care costs.  Sure we pay premiums and copays, but by and large it is employers and health care companies that pick up the lion’s share of the bill.  Because of that, most hospitals aren’t to scared to lose us as customers.  After all, a lot of insurance companies limit your choices when it comes to choosing care providers.  And even if we do have other options available to us for care, we don’t usually exercise them because they aren’t as convenient.

I don’t know many Americans who would bother to travel even ten miles out of their way to visit another clinic or hospital over a $40 copay.  So the hospital gives you less-than-satisfactory service, and you accept it because, let’s face it, you don’t really care.  You’re not paying most of the bill.

This is what happens when we start expecting other people to provide us with our health care.  We lose the power of the consumer.  When we get poor medical service we can’t just take our money elsewhere, as we can with tire shops, because for the most part it isn’t our money being spent.  If it were our money being spent, if we got back to a health care situation in this country where individuals (and not businesses and/or the government) were responsible for their own medical care (see: health savings accounts), we’d get that consumer power back.

The problem is that with that power comes personal responsibility, and there just aren’t a lot of people out there who want that any more.