title: hillary clinton en  dates  le gorafi
text: hospitals raise their prices despite public outcry from overburdened patients 
  thursday october   by ethan a huff staff writer tags hospital visits  rising prices  healthcare costs naturalnews when word got out last year that a handful of hospitals throughout florida were massively pricegouging their patients experts predicted that the outrageous bills for services at these care facilities would quickly drop in response but the exact opposite occurred a new investigation has found with many of these same hospitals not only charging the same ridiculous prices but in some cases drastically more researchers from the university of miami looked at hospital prices both before and after the media picked up on the issue evaluating the billing schemes at some  of the priciest florida hospitals to see how they may have changed they looked at these hospitals total billing charges in the quarter of a year before news of the gouging first broke headlines as well as in the quarter postheadlinesin a fiveyear period spanning from  bayfront health dade city topped the list of floridas most expensive hospitals with price increases nearly doubling following were kendall regional medical center heart of florida regional medical center north okaloosa medical center and sebastian river medical centerall of these facilities and many others despite having their names tarnished for taking advantage of patients were found to still be charging the same or even higher prices in  the researchers learned other than a minor setback of temporarily decreased share prices these exploitative care facilities are continuing to get away with jacking their prices  and with no end in sightwe were thinking we would see a drop or lowering of some charges karoline mortensen coauthor of a study published in the journal of health care finance that looked at hospital prices both before and after the publicity told the washington post wp  theres nothing stopping them theyre not being held accountable to anyone the insurance system is utterly broken and uninsured patients are even worse off part of the problem is that hospitals in most states can legally charge whatever they want for medical services because they know that a bulk of their patients insurance companies will simply foot the bill insurance companies are responsible for negotiating rates which they typically do on behalf of patients so in the end prices decrease at least to some degreebut hospital costs are still prohibitively and unnecessarily expensive in many cases  especially for patients who dont have insurance and who thus have nobody to advocate on their behalf for fairer pricing schemes in the end hospitals are raking their uninsured patients over the coals while these patients have little at their disposal to fight this medical target_blankhttpwwwmedicalchoicenewsmedical tyrannyeven government programs like medicare and medicaid negotiate better pricing in order to decrease costs and yet hospitals are still overcharging them at an everaccelerating rate with the exception of maryland and west virginia states have no regulatory functions in place to prevent such pricegouging which is effectively ruining american healthcarethe other major factor is that among the httpwwwnaturalnewscomhospitalshtmlho included in the investigation only one operates as a nonprofit the rest are forprofit companies that apparently care more about making money than they do about caring for patients while charging a fair and appropriate rate for medical servicesas httpsciencenaturalnewscomhospitalshtm target_blankhospital charges continue to rise and the best path forward to address price transparency continues to elude policy makers and stakeholders it is important to recognize that hospitals may not respond quickly to public exposure and these initiatives the researchers concluded in their earlier study which likely reflects trends all across the countrythe primary causes of extremely high markups in httpwwwnaturalnewscomhospitalhtmlhos markets are lack of price transparency and negotiating power of uninsured patients outofnetwork patients and other disadvantaged payers sources for this article include wwwwashingtonpostcomnewstoyourhealthw target_blankwashingtonpostcom