High medical prices and resulting debt cry out for a solution

There is something very wrong with this picture: The land of opportunity hides an unpredictable and unknowable monster that threatens to devour anyone unlucky enough to get sick without adequate medical insurance.

If that doesn’t scare you, it’s only because you’re not fully aware of the danger and the breadth by which it affects all of us.

The monster is the high cost of medical care in the United States and, as a result, the horrifying ease with which individuals and families can be plunged into medical debt from which there is no escape.

Two stories in the past week brought the related problems of high medical costs and consequential medical debt into clearer focus. What remains sadly unclear is what can be done to tame the medicalcosts monster and protect Americans from the quicksand of medical debt.

But as awareness grows around unsustainable medical costs, so, too, does the imperative for 2020 presidential campaigns to offer solutions. We begin to see why President Donald Trump and every serious Democratic candidate are pushing proposals to reduce medical costs and expand Americans’ access to affordable health care.

The high cost of medical care in the U.S. was highlighted in a New York Times report published Saturday in The Dispatch.

It noted that an annual report by the International Federation of Health Plans has again found, as it does every year, that in nearly every category, the price for medical tests and procedures, medications and even basic checkups is higher here than anywhere else in the world.

And the U.S. prices are not just marginally higher. In most cases, what patients are charged here is many multiples of what it might cost to obtain the same care in other countries. Examples included a $32,200 average U.S. price to clear a blocked blood vessel to the heart compared to $6,400 in the Netherlands; or $1,420 for an MRI scan here but just $450 for the same test in Britain.

Even more aggravating, if that’s possible, is the disparity of prices within the United States, or even in the same central Ohio region.

In a story Tuesday on medical debt, Dispatch Reporter Megan Henry found a $50,000 variance for prostate cancer surgery between what a Springfield hospital priced at $80,000 and what the Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital, part of the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center, eventually performed for $30,000.

In one case, Henry found a Springfield hospital declined to even quote a price while telling an uninsured woman it would not provide the potentially lifesaving colon cancer surgery she needed because she couldn’t pay for it.

Getting out of this medical mess will require a painful remedy, but the cost of not treating it is little better as health care insurance continues to cost more for individuals, families and employers but going without coverage means some who could be treated earlier put off care until it becomes an emergency.

Forcing hospitals and physicians to lower their charges could threaten the availability of health care in certain areas. Transitioning to a government-sponsored universal access program, as some Democratic presidential candidates tout, would jeopardize the insurance industry, producing economic ripples.

There is good reason why some say the path to the White House can be paved by solving the United States’ medical cost-andcoverage conundrum.