So the author's mother-in-law went for a checkup and he noticed a $40 "E/M" fee attached to the bill. When he inquired about what it was, this is the reply he got, verbatim:
“The ‘Evaluation and Management (E/M)’ add-on is used to account for the complexity of E/M services that serve as the continuing focal point for all needed health care services or with medical care services that are part of ongoing care related to a patient’s single, serious condition, or a complex condition.”
This is what the author has to say about this:
An indecipherable email about my mother-in-law’s checkup has me reaching for the pitchfork.
I defy you to tell me what this blithering piffle actually means.
Imagine if your dry cleaner treated you this way. How quickly would you take your business to his competitor across the street? But as we all know, healthcare and insurance don’t operate like normal businesses do. It’s nothing but buck-passing middlemen in league with penny-pinching hospital executives. When there’s trouble, they all point the finger at big government, which points it right back at them.
Healthcare is a diseased sector of our economy where the prices are intentionally obscured and the customer is never right.
I’m a free-market guy. You can look it up. But my increasing irritation with the American healthcare system could make me grab a pitchfork before too long. Another email like that and I might join the movement to tear it all down.
The only problem I have with his analysis is that the American healthcare system is the furthest thing from a free market there is. What he's experiencing has nothing to do with the free market. It has everything to do with a worst-of-both-worlds system: almost everything funded by public money, obscure rules preventing competition, and a "free" market for sharks to siphon from that well. It is not what any economist would consider a competitive market with free enterprise in any traditional sense of the word.