Proof that high medical costs are truly, truly, truly about greed.

It looks like Americans are going to have to learn a lot more about how big corporations actually work. Because our ignorance is allowing some major schemes to be pulled on us.

Case in point: the GOP agenda to eliminate our right to sue doctors for malpractice. Their excuse, as falsely championed by Bush in the last campaign, is that “frivolous” lawsuits are driving up the cost of health care. This is utterly false. And here’s why.

1) Studies are showing that states who limit malpractice suits have not seen any meaningful (if any) drop in costs.

2) The REAL REASON health care corporations keep raising their prices is because, get this, they need to make up the cash they keep losing on Wall Street.

Yep, these companies take their profits and invest them in other companies. But thanks to the recession, they’ve lost money. And instead of facing their own stockholders by fessing up to their bad luck/decisions, they try to extract those lost profits from the millions of Americans who damn well can’t afford to pay it.

So in a nutshell, that $300 price on the bottle of pills your insurance won’t pay for is NOT because of the high costs of research and development, but because of business decisions COMPLETELY UNRELATED to the manufacture and sale of medical products.

(The article includes a rebuttal that says higher costs are because of litigation costs. There might be some truth to that, but the companies are largely to blame for that also. Their lawyer costs would reduce significantly if they did not reject every claim out of hand and force injured people to drag them into court--just to get them to do what they should have done in the first place.)

We need serious oversight and regulation of this industry, and we need it now.