Hospitals Overcharge the Uninsured

Approximately 41.2 million Americans who don't have health insurance today not only have to pay astronomically high healthcare bills out of their own pockets, but they actually pay around 50 to 70 percent more than insurance companies do for health coverage.

The full rates uninsured people end up paying are usually vastly inflated from the actual cost of providing service. For the past 20 years healthcare bills have risen at twice the inflation rate. In 1993 the U.S. General Accounting Office reported that 99 percent of hospital bills have overcharges, which can include "phantom charges" for services that weren't actually given, markups, duplicate billings and charges for unnecessarily long hospital stays or unneeded services.