CNN is doing a series of in-depth reports relating to Steve Brill's article on the incredibly crazy cost of health care. This family racked up huge medical bills, mostly because he was too young for Medicare. Had Medicare been responsible for his coverage, the bills would have been less than a tenth of the total.

The video speaks for itself...I'll just step back and let you watch it.

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Steven Brill has written a must-read article for this week's Time magazine about health care costs and why we really do have to be concerned about them. Following on that, he made an appearance on the round table segment of This Week to discuss those costs and why he's sounding the alarm.

Anyone who has spent even a day in the hospital knows what the problem is. When one over-the-counter pain reliever administered in the hospital costs as much as an entire bottle at the pharmacy, there's a very, very big problem.

Brill correctly points out that Medicare is an efficient program that Congress has managed to hog-tie into some ridiculous costly measures:

And it actually that bears on the conversation we're having, because a chunk of that money is paid by Medicare. Medicare is I point out in the article is very efficient at most things. It buys health care really efficiently, which is a great irony, because it's supposed to be the big government of bureaucracy.

Where Medicare is not efficient is where Congress, because of lobbyists have handcuffed Medicare. Medicare can't negotiate what it pays for any kind of drugs. It can't negotiate what it pays for wheelchairs, diabetes testing equipment. And if Congress took those handcuffs off of Medicare, you could get about half of the spending cuts that we're sitting around here talking about.

Yes, this. Of course, that assumes anyone in Congress is brave enough to stand up to the mighty PhRMA lobby, which seems to have as deep a lock on Washington as the gun lobby. Brill also makes the compelling argument for lowering the Medicare eligibility age, which I have argued over and over again here at C&L. The single biggest cost-saver for Medicare would be to drop the eligibility age, let people buy in until they actually reach retirement age, and then they would drop to the levels under the Social Security law.

By the way, Steve Brill is not by any stretch of the imagination some liberal socialist out to destroy capitalism. The man is a moderate conservative who has done quite well in the land of free enterprise, which made his declaration is a refreshing breath of intellectual honesty about health care in this country.

Brill makes compelling arguments, and I agree with every single one of them. What struck me about this exchange, however, was how George Will hijacked the conversation to talk about all the people in the whole United States who are nothing but a bunch of health care moochers! It's not the costs of health care, people! No, not at all. What we have in this country are a bunch of moochers who don't carry their own weight.

Here's Will, telling us all we mooch:

Here's an argument against that, for a different kind of reform, all the big numbers, billions and trillions, 12 cents is the most important number. 12 cents is the portion of every health care dollar paid by the person receiving the health care. Someone else is paying the rest. It was 47 cents 50 years ago when Jack Kennedy was president.

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I'm actually sympathetic to doctors -- yet in some respects, not. I get into these arguments with them all the time: "There is nothing but your own expectations making you send your kids to private schools, buy an expensive house or get a new car every two years," I say. "You're complaining about paying for private school, yet you live in one of the best school districts in the state. What's up with that?"

One doctor I know (and appreciate, because he keeps his fees low enough that I can actually afford them) is always crying about malpractice insurance premiums and tort reform. "I have a friend in Texas who told me they capped jury awards there, and the malpractice suits went down," he told me.

"I really wish I had your problems," I said. "You're saying that because you want a certain lifestyle, including a wife who stays home with your kids, that other people should give up their legal protections to subsidize that. When you make it impossible for victims to file lawsuits, it means your profession has made a conscious decision to subsidize the really bad doctors. That doesn't seem quite moral to me."

Malpractice premiums are driven by other factors anyway. When insurance companies were making a huge profit and premiums were low, doctors weren't complaining then. Now, when the industry has taken huge losses in the market, they're trying to make up the difference. The problem? Capitalism!

"Plus, you guys do a terrible job of policing your profession," I said. "Remember, 95 percent of malpractice cases are generated by the same 5 percent of doctors." (I used to be a medical fraud investigator; I saw the same familiar names, over and over.)

Still, when I read about this study, the researchers didn't mention that when doctors sign insurance company contracts, they agree they won't offer reduced rates to the uninsured. It would probably be a less controversial and more popular approach to make those contract conditions (i.e. insurance profitability subsidies) illegal, don't you think?

WASHINGTON — Doctors are paid higher fees in the United States than in several other countries, and this is a major factor in the nation’s higher overall cost of health care, says a new study by two Columbia University professors, one of whom is now a top health official in the Obama administration.

“American primary care and orthopedic physicians are paid more for each service than are their counterparts in Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom,” said the study, by Sherry A. Glied, an assistant secretary of health and human services, and Miriam J. Laugesen, an assistant professor of health policy at Columbia.

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I know many of you are worried about Susie after she went into the hospital the other day and I wanted to give you a quick update on her. She called me from the hospital a little while ago and sounded pretty good, but tired. She needs another test to hopefully rule out anything to do with her heart and may have to stay over for another night.

She wants to thank all those that have shown her nothing but kindness and so do I.

I expect some pretty hefty hospital bills coming out of this along with a clean bill of health and if you want to make a donation to her PayPal account, you can do it via here.

She's on the east coast and as usual was worried about her Internet connection because of the approaching Hurricane. Typical blogger mentality.

I'll keep you posted.

In yet another illustration of why no, you really don't want government run like a business, a very interesting piece by Mariah Price from The Washington Monthly about hospitals' group purchasing operations:

In theory, GPOs are supposed to lower hospitals' supply costs by buying in bulk from manufacturers. The problem is that GPOs make their money from commissions and fees paid by the manufacturers -- in essence, a form of kickback that in any other industry would be illegal but isn't in this industry, thanks to an obscure loophole in Medicare law. Reformers have wanted to get rid of that loophole for years, arguing that it allows big medical device makers to collude with the GPOs to set prices and terms and keep small manufacturers, which might offer cheaper and better products, out of the market. But despite several congressional investigations, no one could prove whether or not GPOs did what they claimed, which is lower the prices hospitals pay for supplies.

Blake, however, came upon a Texas-based company called MEMdata, which helps hospitals process their equipment bids, and therefore has in its database both the prices GPOs are charging hospitals and what they could get if they bargained directly with the manufacturers. MEMdata's CEO Bob Yancy showed some of this data to Blake and estimated that on average the GPOs' prices are 22 percent higher than the ones that hospitals can get on their own. "The bottom line is that hospitals are being systematically overcharged," Yancy told Blake. "GPOs are inflating the pricing."

Since that story was published, two economists, Robert Litan of the Brookings Institution and Hal Singer of the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, have looked deeper into MEMdata's records. On Wednesday they published a study funded by the Medical Device Manufacturers Association, an industry trade group, that confirms what Blake found. According to the study, GPOs increase health care costs nationwide by $37.5 billion a year, and cost the federal government $11.5 billion annually -- money that could be saved simply by getting rid of the anti-kickback provision.