--- title: Video: Steven Brill on Rising Medical Costs | TIME description: Steven Brill talks to TIME about his cover story on the outrageous pricing and egregious profits that are destroying our health care. canonical: https://time.com/video/MydyUO9f/ og:title: Video: Steven Brill on Rising Medical Costs og:description: Steven Brill talks to TIME about his cover story on the outrageous pricing and egregious profits that are destroying our health care. og:url: https://time.com/video/MydyUO9f/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/MydyUO9f/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Video: Steven Brill on Rising Medical Costs twitter:description: Steven Brill talks to TIME about his cover story on the outrageous pricing and egregious profits that are destroying our health care. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/MydyUO9f/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Video: Steven Brill on Rising Medical Costs > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Video: Steven Brill on Rising Medical Costs [Watch (HLS stream): Video: Steven Brill on Rising Medical Costs](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/MydyUO9f.m3u8) (3:37)  _Published 2013-02-21. Steven Brill talks to TIME about his cover story on the outrageous pricing and egregious profits that are destroying our health care._ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:30 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Health Care Costs Rising Faster Than Pay](/video/svi6nfLy/) ### Health Care Costs Rising Faster Than Pay [Wages Can't Keep Up With Rising Health Care Costs](/video/Z1WAjTrK/) ### Wages Can't Keep Up With Rising Health Care Costs [Health Care Cost Increases Expected To Accelerate In 2015](/video/KYT0EBCl/) ### Health Care Cost Increases Expected To Accelerate In 2015 --- ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] This is not a free market. You don't get health care because you want it. You don't wake up in the morning and say, gee, I'd love to go down to the emergency room today. You enter that market unwillingly. You know nothing about the products that you're being asked to buy in the market. You have no choice of those products. [ MUSIC ] Hi. I'm Steve Brill, I've got the cover story this week in TIME magazine, looking at the healthcare debate from a very different perspective. Everybody focuses on who should pay for the exorbitant cost of healthcare. And what I decided to do, was ask the more fundamental question which is, why does healthcare cost so much? I looked behind eight bills and traced the bills all the way back to who's getting what money, who's making what profits, and the results are are really surprising. One of the things I found that that everybody in the healthcare industry knows about but that nobody else knows about, is something called the charge master. And the charge master is a, an eternal list in each hospital of the thousands of different items that they charge for and nobody could explain it to me and indeed, it would be hard to explain. For example, why would you charge a $ 77 for a box of gauze pads that you can buy for a dollar at the local drug store? Why would you charge, you know, thousands of dollars for a CAT scan that really doesn't cost you anything? And it's emblematic, if you will. Of the irrationality of the entire healthcare system because no one can explain the cost. No one even tries to explain the cost and the only people who are guaranteed sure fire to pay, to be asked to pay the charge master prices are the poorest people who don't have health insurance. The real profit makers are the way hospitals mark up the very expensive drugs that you get, you know, if you have cancer, if you have pneumonia. You know they're making thousands of dollars on these drugs and the drug companies in turn are making still more thousands of dollars. Obamacare does very little. To solve any of these problems which is probably why it got through Congress. It doesn't do anything to control the prices of our prescription drugs or medical devices you know, such as a CAT scan. In fact if anything, it will increase the profits of all the players in the market. By making sure that more people have insurance and therefore more people are in the marketplace with the funds you know, from insurance companies to buy all these products. Insurance companies are not really the pre the problem there. They're run pretty terribly it's basically sort of a ho hum business where you know, they process claims, a lot of us think they process claims unfairly or you know, inconsistently. But, they are increasingly at the mercy of hospitals, which are consolidating buying up doctors' practices. We should tax profits on so- called nonprofit hospitals and put that money back into the system. We should control the prices of the prescription drugs, because if I have a monopoly on a cancer wonder drug. Then I can charge anything I want for it. That's obviously not a free market, and it's gonna lead to the kinds of abuses that you see in this article, once you follow the money. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Video: Steven Brill on Rising Medical Costs","description":"Steven Brill talks to TIME about his cover story on the outrageous pricing and egregious profits that are destroying our health care.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/MydyUO9f/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2013-02-21T01:00:05.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/MydyUO9f.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/MydyUO9f/","duration":"PT3M37S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/MydyUO9f/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```