Fifty hospitals in the United States are charging uninsured consumers more than 10 times the actual cost of patient care, according to research published Monday. All but one of the facilities are owned by for-profit entities and the largest number of hospitals — 20 — are in Florida. For the most part, researchers said, the hospitals with the highest markups are not in pricey neighborhoods or big cities, where the market might explain the higher prices. Topping the list is North Okaloosa Medical Center, a 110-bed facility in the Florida Panhandle about an hour outside of Pensacola. Uninsured patients are charged 12.6 times the actual cost of patient care. […] "They are price-gouging because they can," said Gerard Anderson, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, co-author of the study in Health Affairs. "They are marking up the prices because no one is telling them they can't."

Here's a look at "the best healthcare system in the world." Most of these hospitals are in red states that didn't take Medicaid expansion and where subsidies for health insurance purchased through Obamacare are jeopardized by the lawsuit the Supreme Court will decide by the end of the month. Which means that a lot of these hospitals are in states that already still have high uninsured rates. Rates that will increase if the Supreme Court rules against the administration and the Republican Congress refuses to act. But hey, that's just more profit to Community Health Systems, which operates 25 of the hospitals on the list, and Hospital Corporation of America, which has 14 of the others. Republicans will say that's just how it works in the world's greatest healthcare system.