The latest installment in a Times series about health-care costs focuses on the bags of saline solution used in intravenous drips. "At White Plains Hospital, a patient with private insurance from Aetna was charged $91 for one unit of Hospira IV that cost the hospital 86 cents, according to a hospital spokeswoman, Eliza O'Neill," the Times reports. The newspaper says the same hospital charged another patient who also had private insurance "$546 for six liters of saline that cost the hospital $5.16."
There is a glancing reference to ObamaCare in a sentence that says, "The Affordable Care Act encourages these developments as it drives toward a reimbursement system that strives to keep people out of hospitals through more coordinated, cost-efficient care paid on the basis of results, not services. But the billing mysteries in the food poisoning case show how easily cost-cutting can turn into cost-shifting." But no congressmen who voted for ObamaCare and no Obama administration officials are put on the spot with the question — "Hey, health care reform passed three years ago. Wasn't it supposed to fix this sort of nonsense? Why is it still happening?"