Posts
1968
Joined
7/21/2011
Location
Galesburg, IL, USA
Edited Date/Time
7/17/2019 11:44am
Recently had a trip the ER.
Was there 3 hours and received an IV and X-Ray, probably 140 minutes of that time was just waiting around.
Bill is $18,000 dollars. The hospital charges for the stay, for the lab, for the x-ray, for everything.
I have UHC healthcare, but I'll still be liable for a big chunk and possibly hit max out of pocket. Luckily I've been investing heavily in my HSA to cover exactly this BS stuff.
Soap box, but the cost hospitals are allowed to even bill should be considered criminal. They know you can't exactly shop-around for this stuff and every dam hospital is equally expensive. How is it not considered price fixing?
What would happen if people actually wised up and all collectively stopped paying medical bills as a form of peaceful protest?
Any crazy stories about high costs for little service?
Was there 3 hours and received an IV and X-Ray, probably 140 minutes of that time was just waiting around.
Bill is $18,000 dollars. The hospital charges for the stay, for the lab, for the x-ray, for everything.
I have UHC healthcare, but I'll still be liable for a big chunk and possibly hit max out of pocket. Luckily I've been investing heavily in my HSA to cover exactly this BS stuff.
Soap box, but the cost hospitals are allowed to even bill should be considered criminal. They know you can't exactly shop-around for this stuff and every dam hospital is equally expensive. How is it not considered price fixing?
What would happen if people actually wised up and all collectively stopped paying medical bills as a form of peaceful protest?
Any crazy stories about high costs for little service?
If you “wise up” and stop paying your bill it makes you a dick, the doctor has to feed his family too.
You have to play the game and I hate playing games
They are human beings.
I say deregulate the whole thing.
Get rid of hippa.
Put the American Medical Association on the frying pan. Either they quadruple the amount of doctors they produce or certify 10 other entities to create doctors.
Expand the Veterans Hospitals to handle the general public. You can't pay, see a government Doctor.
You wanna get your own guy, and pay his rate that's cool. Just don't lock the profession up so they can just charge what they want.
Medicine, screw the likes of Myland.
You want aspirin from China, or some cutting edge cancer pills from Canada it should be your choice.
Whoever invented it.
The guys that invented MRIs, they've made their millions. Mass produce those things.
To make millions on the backs of the sick and inferm,
I dunno, it's fucking criminal imo.
I needed a few stitches on a finger last year and it was around $1,200. Maximum 10 mins of care from a physicians assistant/nurse. Did such a poor job it required a trip to my regular doctor a few days later.
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2014 I went to work for a big company.
Obama care was going to fine me if I didn't have insurance.
At 60, my policy with Highmark went to 1150. A month. Paid that for 4 years.
Add that up.
1150 times 12 times 4.
And never used it.
Throughout the entire 12 hour shift nobody got admitted, nobody actually needed to stay in hospital, out of the 30 people that came in. (It's a very small hospital) 90% of these people could have just been seen at a simple clinic for a lot less money. But because of potential lawsuits, a lot of these people got full $30k work ups. Im in commiefornia too, so taxes paid for most of it.
I think the first step to fixing any of it, would be to educate people, even minimally, about how their bodies work. That could prevent a lot of this waste. But that wont happen
Sorry about your bill, sometimes you can call the billing department of the hospital and negotiate a lower price.
fuck this socialised medicine sucks at times,
If had a few get offs and needs surgery all free
We took an ambulance ride when our daughter had a seizure to a children’s hospital. At the hospital she saw a doctor for a few minutes. She received 2 popsicles and Motrin and Tylenol. We were there two hours.
Ambulance ride was $800
Hospital Bill was $5,700
We are on a high deductible plan via my work so I’ll pay most/all that out if pocket. I will have hit my maximum for the year so anything else is “free” if there is such a thing.
Health costs are out of control.
Edit: We pay $850 a month for a family of 5.
I'm not oblivious to the political lobbying and politician deals that get made, it has been like that for a long time.
We'll end up paying about $7,500 before we reach our max. That's crippling for most middle and lower class families already paying high monthly premiums.
They just don't get the financial burdens it places on people. A single health care bill for routine services can cause financial havoc for years.
I am not advocating that health care should be free, but regulation that makes costs reasonable and upfront. There should be more education and discussion where costs of services should be disclosed before happening (in non emergency situations)
It’s what the doctors, hospitals and pharma companies charge, it’s just ridiculous.
Pit Row
Think about that for a bit. And average out that some will likely be billed more for actual treatment, and some less, but the OPs initial post shows even simple diagnostics are pretty aggressively billed.
That’s $900,000 of charges for 30 patients, 2.5 patients per hour.
That’d be $1.8 million if that pace occurred for 24 hours.
ERs are open 24/7, so 365 x $1.8M = $657M in charges. For only the ER department.
It’s hard to justify nearly 2/3 of a BILLION DOLLARS in charges for an ER that sees less than 3 new patients an hour. Hard to blame that fee schedule on the uninsured, especially if the hospital is paid by the government for those folks. The problem sounds much more like just pure greed.....
Call me a damn commy but I don’t think healthcare should ever be a for profit business.
As one of the other posters said above, a great deal of money is spent on unneccessary tests and procedures because of the cover-your-ass, lawsuit prone nature of this country. If someone *might* have some condition, even if it is highly unlikely, we will put them through every diagnostic test in the book. Because if we don't, and something happens down the line that we "missed", you can bet your ass the hospital and the medical team itself will be sued. Malpractice claims and lawsuits are a huge reason healthcare is so expensive here.
The other problem I see first hand is administrative bloat. We have many administrative/management personnel making six-figure salaries who never lay hands on patients. Many of them are former nurses and doctors who are working "retirement in place" type gigs where they are doing very simple, nonskilled work for outrageous salaries. The sort of work you could pay an administrative assistant $13/hr to do. Healthcare in the U.S. is rampant with people like this. Our system leadership, in a "non-profit" organization, make 500-600k+ per year. And we're just one hospital in one city.
It's a pretty fucked up system once you see it from the inside.
https://outline.com/FL8HCa
Summary:
Hospital raises price for knee surgery 3% a year no matter what till its $50,000
Somebody asks “ How do we know we are making money.”
Nobody knows what it costs
They do a study a find out it costs $10,500.
So if this is typical, your health care cost 5X what they could be.
This link picks up the graphics link better.
http://archive.is/imVv3
Even if you fly here legally on a visa and show up to a hospital you never have to pay that bill. So maybe the border closing wouldn’t solve the problem but I imagine it would decrease the load on ERs. Less people, less visits.
The other thing is hosptial waste..... supplies just get wasted. They’re like chapstick. You buy a bottle. Never use the entire thing. Turns up missing or gets thrown away. Hosptial supplies and equipment are the same way except that shit isnt just $1.00 a stick. It can be thousands.
The whole system is jacked. And billboards advertising the current wait time for an ER isn’t helping the problem.
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