American Healthcare from the Outside

So I am not usually one to blog, so excuse my inexperience, my name is Nicholas, but Nic is fine, just not ‘Saint Nic’. I am the Chief Operations Officer of Exorbital and another one of its founders. I will start this with a little bit about myself. I am an English student studying Biochemistry at my home university. Over the past 6 months, I have been learning about American Healthcare and how it can be improved (in my opinion, don’t take it to heart if you disagree). I do not think any of my ideas can really be put into practice as of yet, then again one man trying to change a whole country he doesn’t even live in (yet) doesn’t make much sense. I have been leading the research on how the healthcare system in America is managed and what Exorbital can do to make it easier to navigate.

I have learnt a lot about the costs that a lot of people, who need help, pay for even simple visits. Around 90% of Americans will visit a doctor in a standard year, but more often than enough, there will be a few more visits for a physical check up, or just needing antibiotics for the flu. This leads to a total industry cost of around 5 trillion dollars a year. If that was a pile of $100 bills, it would be 3155 miles high, which is about the length from Orlando to Seattle. I was recently informed by Google that it would take me about a thousand hours of continuous walking and hundreds of hours of breaks (because I am not fit enough to do it without decent rest stops).

A lot of this cost is down to how each hospital charges for care, which is called the chargemaster, a document of supreme power in a hospital. This usually is not shared with the public, or other hospitals, so to find out initial costs and affordable facilities, it takes lots of research and/or visiting multiples hospitals for them to ask you if you have insurance first and then not tell you the cost. No one wants to visit the hospital, let alone more than once. It shouldn’t be impossible to compare actual prices, not estimates that range from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars. Without these prices mandated to be shared, they can be raised exorbitantly, without anyone finding out and the patients are the ones having to take it on the chin.

As part of my research, I had to look into how the World Health Organization organizes and rates countries on how good their healthcare systems run. I was surprised to find out that the top 10 countries as ranked by WHO, runs some form of government backed healthcare, and yet United States does not rank in the top 30. Weird seeing that it is the best healthcare in the world supposedly. This doesn’t mean that healthcare isn’t great in the States, but great for who the companies or the consumers. Well wherever you go for healthcare, we are here to arm you with the required knowledge, before going thousands of dollars in debt for a terrible doctor who got his degree online for two hundred quid. Providing you with doctor reviews, or at least checking that your insurance covers the visit there. No more 5 hour phone calls with your insurance, am I right?

Nicholas Bell

The man who doesn’t know how to take a proper selfie.

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Thank you for reading. I may make a few more posts, whenever I find something interesting to talk about and you might need to know (and have a quick read about). Next, I will probably talk about how English Healthcare works and why we are barely in the Top 20, ourselves. Take care, wear a mask, stay safe.

Nic