Why Health Care Insurance is so expensive

As most of you know, I've been treated since last October for some ailment - inflamation, yadda yadda - in my left shoulder.

Until my job change and Teamster's coverage, I was treated by Group Health, via my spouse's coverage with the State. My Teamster coverage is so superior to Group Health that we dropped GHC entirely, as one would not cover the other anyway.

My meds cost 1/3 as much through the Teamsters Mail Pharmacy as GHC, copays for doctor visits are $20 - not too bad.

Today, I was looking at my portion of a bill from the Orthopaedist that gave me my last cortizone injection - back in July. Since I had a deductible to cover, I was billed that which my insurance didn't cover.

Here is the rub - The gross billing from the Orthopaedic firm came to $500!!! That was for about 10 minutes of the doctor's time and an injection. Needless to say, they knew I had good insurance coverage.

The doctors blame the insurance and the insurance blames the doctors. Meanwhile I thinking about some poor guy my age, with a similar malady that lost his insurance when his job was outsourced and has to cough up $500 for a cortizone shot????????

Of course we don't want that socialist national medicine, unless we are the guy whose shoulder has him screaming in pain.