> The billed items also have to cover everything. It’s not directly $37 for the aspirin, or the $5 or whatever allowed coverage it ultimately gets billed it. That had to cover the facilities, the salaries of the pharmacy staff who reviewed the request and dispensed it, the staff who inventory and order the medications, and the cost of billing insurance.

That's the same as any? CVS charging $5 for aspirin has to cover their staff who stocked and checked out the item, the shelf space, the marketing, and the looting.

The comparison you make between a bottle of wine vs a glass is not the right one. It's two different stores selling the same product. What's different about hospitals?

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fragmede a day ago | parent [-]

The nursing staff to give the patient aspirin costs a lot more than someone stocking boxes on shelves.

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tptacek a day ago | parent | next [-]

This is like that thing about about $15,000 toilets at DoD. What's actually happening is a cost allocation function where an agreed-on list price for a whole project is getting distributed pro-rata over as many different line-items as possible.

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pstuart 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That seems like a way to disincentivize cost optimizations in the project (for the client).

	▲	tptacek 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Oh, sure, it's bad! It's just a particular kind of bad.

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malfist a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, it's more expensive, but is it thousands of times more expensive? That $5 bottle probably has 50-100 pills in it. A single dose for $37 is 740X more expensive. And its not just that the apsrin is expensive to cover salaries, EVERYTHING is similarly inflated.