It’s almost laughable that a health program is the latest wrench in the machine Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell created to take health care away from millions of Americans. As we wait for Senator McCain’s recovery from complications related to a blood clot, Vox tried to investigate approximately how costly his procedure is. Going off an official press release from his office saying he had a craniotomy, the publication did some digging to see how much that’d cost—and, unsurprisingly, it’s a lot.
To find out just how much the procedure would cost someone without insurance, we looked to CMS, which publishes Medicare payments for more than 3,000 hospitals for inpatient procedures.
At the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix (line 1598 of this spreadsheet), the most recent data (2014) suggests the average Medicare charge for a craniotomy was $76,119, while average payments ranged from $25,932 to $33,958.
It’s near impossible to know what McCain’s bill would be for the procedure, but they did a pretty good job of getting a loose ballpark. The numbers are from 2014, so it’s probably safe to say that the price is even higher. Considering that the average household income is at $55,775 in 2015, the procedure costs more than what most Americans would make in a year. That’s why fighting this backward Republican health care law is so important; it’s simply bad for the American people.