What Are We Paying for at Hospitals?

By Cecilia Stewart & Pari Patel

Editor: Breanna Naysmith

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Did you know that nine out of ten hospital bills are overpriced? You would think the hospital helps you stay safe, but really they legally extort you for all you have. If the hospital can overprice it, they will, whether it’s bandaids, Tylenol, or anything. It feels like just walking into a hospital for 3 seconds is all it takes to lose money.

To find a real example of overpricing, we calculated the price for a singular band-aid at Walmart and a band-aid at the hospital, which are the same brand just at different prices. To do this, we found the price of a box of band-aids and divided the price by the amount in the box, in this case it was 100 band-aids for only $6.88. The price for one individual band-aid is $0.07. A study done by Nerdwallet found that hospitals overprice their services by about 26.4%. When you multiply that by 26.4% and the ending price for ONE band-aid at a hospital is $1.85, It proves hospitals are way overpriced.

Obviously, if you have insurance then the price will be lowered or covered completely. However, there are still other people who can't afford insurance or the insurance doesn't cover all the things you need. These people have to decide if the problem is big enough for a trip to the hospital, solely because if it isn’t, they would be overcharged for a minor issue.

Other researchers state that one year’s sum of medical bills is millions of dollars of overpricing. This is something we need to fix due to the fact that just a small band-aid with barely any service costs too much.