Someone should ask Mr. Money Bags ("I have 20 million listeners") Rush if he'll make up the difference, if he's wrong.

BTW, a complete physical with appropriate blood work from my doctor costs me $15.00. I have insurance, obviously. I imagine that Rush would dismiss a physical as "routine", though.

If it's one thing I trust Rush Limbaugh to do, it's doctor shop.

great minds and all

Yeah right, Windbag.
Type I diabetics are better off paying retail for their daily insulin shots.
What an unthinking dumbass.

I assume he gets away with this kind of shit in part because his listeners with health insurance don't actually know what a doctor visit costs, and those without don't go?

It's interesting to note, BTW, that here a GP visit costs $150 cash, whereas in Ireland (which has universal coverage for public hospital care, chronic conditions, and poor people, but all else is out of pocket) it costs $50. Oh and also you can pretty much walk into a doctor's office there and get an appointment that day, whereas here I usually have to wait a month to get one.

"You oughtta try this, folks, just a standard doctor visit, offer to pay for it yourself," said Limbaugh. "I guarantee it'll cost you less than if you use your insurance."

Limbaugh's not only a windbag -- he's an utter moron. If I go to my doctor without insurance, I'll be charged $120 for a typical visit. However, my insurer, BlueCross, knocks the price down to around $80. If I haven't hit my deductible, that's what I pay and if I have, I pay $20.

It's even worse if you go to a hospital. And unbelievable if you have to go get a blood test. I've had labs charge over $100 for a simple blood test, which BlueCross knocks down to $7.

When you don't have insurance, you have no purchasing power and you're forced to pay the maximum rates no matter what.

And of course, God forbid you have a serious accident, have a heart attack or get cancer, because you'll be looking at bills in the six- and seven-figure range. Not a problem if you're a multimillionaire moronic windbag, but for the rest of us...

Obama should headline his speech tonight with this. ANYONE can see what complete bullshit it is. It's a perfect lead-in to a discussion of all the other nonsense that's been spouted.

i don't have insurance and recently i was very sick and worried it might be pneumonia so i went to a gp.... for the first time in 8 years. total cost out of pocket including meds was over $600. i just hope i can stay well until i turn 65, or at least marry a canadian.

If this quack was a doctor, this advice would be considered Malpractice. I hope these guys keep it up, they are getting more whacko every day. Only problem is, the average American isn't getting any smarter.

Two items you folks might be missing for context. He was responding to a woman who needed an Xray for her toe and the first place wanted $269.00. She eventually found a place that charged $20.00.
Second, the Baucus bill will ensure that everyone HAS to buy insurance or be charged a $3800.00 fine levied and enforced by the IRS. But hey, that's OK, right?

I have tried this twice for "standard office visits" and it did not work. The doctor's office did not have mechanism for direct pay and could not tell me the price. I even called ahead to get the price and was given a vague answer. It is apparently easier for doctors to bill the insurance company.

Ever try paying cash for a doctor visit? I did at one of those emergency medical places. Got two stitches in my knuckle. No x-rays, a little shot of topical numbing stuff (  yes, that’s the medical term) After several phone calls they finally admitted they didn't know what to charge me and refused to accept my money. Told me I'd get a bill in the mail. 6 weeks later sure enough a bill arrived. It was for $472.00 for maybe 15 minutes and two stitches. I called and asked them if this was the price for a cash customer and the woman on the phone said no, it was the same price they charged everyone. I told her that as a cash customer they had a totally different overhead as they did not have all the time involved in the insurance paperwork etc. We went round and round. She hung up on me, I hung up on her. She referred me to the home office and something like 96,000 conversations and 1 1/2 years later they reduced the charge to $175.00 and I paid it and vowed never again (pay cash that is, not visit a doctor). Sheesh, sometimes you gotta go a far assed way to prove a point.

It costs $200.00 to see the doctor w/o insurance.

It's $30 to see him with insurance.

What planet is he on?

"You oughtta try this, folks, just a standard doctor visit, offer to pay for it yourself," said Limbaugh. "I guarantee it'll cost you less than if you use your insurance."

As others have said, this is false. Is Limbaugh just making things up? It's very often the case that providers will charge uninsured people quite a bit more for a given procedure than they charge insurance companies.

However, there is truth to the claim that if you are self-paying, you can save a bunch of money by going to the trouble of comparing fees. This is because they vary wildly.

It's worth pointing out that anyone who champions a market oriented approach to health care—as Limbaugh certainly does—that this huge price variability (for the same service, for the same patient, with the same patient ability to pay) proves that the health care market in the US is very malfunctioning and inefficient.

Also, one notorious example of how broken this market is that should be more widely known than it is, is how widely varying different pharmacies charge for generic medications—for both the uninsured and the insured, but it's more extreme for the uninsured. Some pharmacies have hugely inflated prices for some generic medications for the uninsured. The most extreme example I'm aware of from personal experience is an antidepressant that is around $300 for a month's supply at a large, well-known chain pharmacy and only $25 at a
"wholesale" big-box store that has a policy of a set minimal mark-up on their generics. More typically, the higher prices I've personally seen have been about three to five times the lesser.

As someone mentions that Limbaugh discussed with his caller, this is true for things like X-rays, too. If you shop around, you can find a huge difference between highest and lowest, most especially if you're self-paying.

Unlike Limbaugh, I realize that this isn't a good thing. It's difficult to comparison shop for health care in the best of circumstances. But the fact that prices and fees vary so enormously indicates that the market itself is very distorted and inefficient.