Healthcare costs are oddly opaque to most Americans. If you visit your doctor or are required to stay in a hospital for a stint, it's rare to get an itemized bill. Most folks' medical bills are, in whole or in part, settled by an insurance company or by the government. In short, we don't really know what a lot of these visits and treatments cost, much less whether what we're being billed for (or what our insurance company is being billed for) accurately reflects what care we actually received.
One state-level agency, OhioHealth, has been accused of ripping off providers and patients. Now, the Trump administration has browbeaten them into making a settlement in an ongoing lawsuit.
Well, well, well… just as everyone is out there accusing the Trump administration of doing absolutely nothing to hold down prices for pissed- off Americans ahead of a tough midterm election, what did the Buckeye team uncover when we opened our inboxes after lunch today?
It turns out the Trump DOJ has forced OhioHealth to settle over allegations of ripping off health insurers– and that means you and me, the people who pay for health insurance, whether it’s in the form of lost salary, payments for benefits, buying our insurance on the Obamacare exchanges or directly from insurers, or via Medicaid and Medicare Advantage, which are substantially taxpayer-funded but rely on private insurance as opposed to taxpayer-funded direct payments to providers.
From Healthcare Dive:
The DOJ and Ohio’s attorney general sued OhioHealth in February, accusing the regional nonprofit of leveraging its market dominance to force insurers to include its providers in their networks — even if those providers were costlier than competitors. As a result, OhioHealth was able to get away with charging higher prices than other systems, especially in the Columbus metropolitan area, where the system controls a large swath of acute care services, the DOJ said.
The suit sought to block OhioHealth from enforcing those contract provisions and from retaliating against insurers that attempted to introduce more “budget-conscious” plans — terms that the system agreed to in Tuesday’s settlement. The deal also appoints a monitor to ensure OhioHealth’s compliance over the next five years.
…
OhioHealth said it agreed to the settlement to avoid the costs of drawn-out litigation.
That's not the worst thing to ever happen, now, is it? And it's not the first time the Trump administration has done a bit of a lean on these companies; there's a similar case in New York, as well.
As More Americans Adjust Their Lives Due to Healthcare Costs, Drug Companies Gut Programs That Help
The report here makes it sound like OhioHealth was trying to build an effective monopoly in health insurance, and obviously, that won't fly. But there are plenty of states with similar organizations, and a lot of those are re-negotiating contracts right now; Florida and Georgia, just to name a couple. In many cases, these companies are expecting significant rate hikes, but it looks like the Trump administration isn't having any of it; they are using what tools are available to the government to keep things in check.
All of this begs the question: Where was the Biden administration on this?
Well, befuddled old Joe Biden, the autopen, and their minions were, on this as with so many other issues, asleep at the wheel.Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump’s leadership and bold policies, America’s economy is back on track.
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