Consumer protection and justice

How much a new patient can bring to hospital's revenue? New patient can easily be charged more than $200 dollars for "administrative fee" for signing on a few pages of patients' notices. Clerks at a medical center in Mountain View, California spent less than 5 minutes printing out a few pages of notices for patients to sign and charges $250 for new patient admission. Looking at the big building where the hospital is located, no wonder the bill is so high. The problem is that the $250 bill would never be told before patients come.

Doctors are also charging a high rate at hundreds of dollars per visit. Such charges are usually stomached by patients without further questions, as long as insurance companies approve hospital claims. However, a 60 Minutes interview with former HMA employees exposes pressure doctors and hospitals have to admit more patients, even they should not be admitted. All evidence drew to one conclusion, the health care association is driven by profit, not health care quality. Doctors are pressured to fill empty beds. Administrative officers are ordered to tone their allegations. Employees are fired because of short of revenue expectation. These are attorneys, directors, high ranking officers in the organization.

Of course, individuals in the interview had no power and resource to fight with HMA. But the Department of Justice can. If the 60 Minutes program discovered the case before DoJ was involved, the program would be praised. But there is no claim to indicate that. Therefore, we believe DoJ was notified from other resources. How many of us will go to DoJ because of a $200 new patient admission fee? How many of us know the DoJ is the place to go if bothered by the bill?

Quite often, individuals are left behind in fighting large organizations. Smaller investors write to the SEC to complain brokerage firms and would most likely be fooled attorneys. Even FINRA, the body regulating brokerage firms, is paid by the brokerage industry. How can logically such organization be on smaller investors' side? The SEC is indeed funded by the federal government. But the attorneys there are very reserved in confronting with big firms' attorneys because they may seek a job in these big firms some day in the future.

There are many levels of consumer protection programs, non-profit and government funded. Often the government ones are considered more powerful and authoritative. The government can sure do more. However, when their power is not on people's side, the power becomes evil.