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Steven Brill: 'You Can't Allow People To Charge What They Want When It's Life Or Death'

By Chris Stigall

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Steven Brill, author of America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Back-Room Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System told WPHT morning host Chris Stigall what he feels is wrong with Obamacare and who is getting rich from it.

 

"What we got with Obamacare was a lot more people getting access to healthcare, which is a good thing, but the prices are way too high, because what passes for reform in Washington is something that enriches the industries that are already rich and the healthcare industry is by far the largest industry in the country. It spends four times as much lobbying as the second largest industry, the military industrial complex. So therefore, what you get behind the 'gobbledygook' that Jon Gruber talks about is a law that enriches everybody in the name of healthcare reform."

Stigall suggested walk-in clinics, which he has seen a rise in as of late, as a "good free market answer" to the rising costs of healthcare and everything going on in the industry and Brill agreed with him as long as they are "regulated and we know who the people are who are supposedly providing the healthcare."

"The really prominent significant hospitals in all of the communities in this country ought to be allowed and encouraged to open up their own walk-in clinics. Now they're hesitant to do it because those clinics compete with their super extensive emergency rooms, but if we told them they had to do that and we weren't going to pay for people to go to the emergency for a headache, that would make a lot of sense."

He proposes that the only way to cut down the costs for healthcare is to create "meaningful competition" in the marketplace and when there is no competition for it to be controlled.

"If there is no competition, then you can't allow people to charge whatever they want for something that is a matter of life and death. The simplest way to explain the problem is that except for the nurses and doctors who actually provide the care, everybody else in healthcare is just making too much money: the executives running the hospitals, the drug companies; the people selling CAT scans and MRI equipment."

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