-- Forbes I don't think it's in this story, but insurance companies and Medicare Advantage Plans negotiate huge discounts on prescription drugs too, but these savings aren't passed on to their clients. So if a prescription drug is priced at $50 and your Advantage Plan negotiates a 50% discount on that, the $25 savings is pure profit to the insurance company handling your Advantage Plan. You will be charged as if the price were $50, for whatever part of that you are responsible for under the plan.
A very misleading story, @Ken Anderson. The headlines refer to charges, but the graphs refer to payment rates--not the same thing. As I have said before, Medicare often only pays 20% of what they are billed, but hospitals and doctors are forbidden to charge less to privately insured and individual payers, so when hospitals have to charge 5 times what they would normally to recover at least some of their expenses, they cannot legally in most cases charge private insurance less than the amount they charge Medicare. Medicare reimbursement is the reason that the charges are so high to private insurance, but many of them have worked around the problem with PPOs and other network agreements. As far as the increase in deductibles and co-payments mentioned "over the last decade", most of that is due to Obamacare-required coverage. One of my sons, who works for a national company had a co-pay of $25 and a deductible (family) of $500 prior to Obamacare. After Obamacare, his co-payment went to $75 and his deductible went to $15,000, making it almost unusable. Some of that has since been backed off by revisions by Congress under Trump, but it is still bad. Our healthcare system is expensive but responsive. Most of the casts, however is due to government intervention, not infatuation by hospitals...although the for-profit chains are responsible for some. The "Non-profits" have to keep their margins (profits) under 7% to remain non-profit (when I worked), so they generally are not price gouging...although undoubtedly some gouging does occur.