Originally published at: Colorado hospital tells pregnant woman to enter through emergency room door, then charges her a fortune | Boing Boing
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“But…but…socialised medicine is the Road to Serfdom!” /AynCap
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NPR Link:
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One recent egregious example: a pregnant woman was “instructed to go through the emergency room doors at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colo., because it was the only entrance open.” She gave a normal birth — no emergency – and yet the hospital billed her for emergency services.
Lord help the UberEats and DoorDash delivery folk.
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I taught I saw a pussy cat… no…
I thought it used to be all about candies and bad teeth…
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Telling me the health care system is completely f’d up in the USA, without tell me the health care system is completely f’d up in the USA.
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Probably the worst thing about the US health care system is that giving birth costs money. And not a little like shitload of money.
When I told my wife a few years ago she was really upset. She was angry and almost insulted.
How do you even get people to reproduce? Oh yeah right abstinence only sex-ed. 
My best friend loves the US, travels there every second year or so for a few weeks (paid vacation that we obviously have) but she said never in her life would she want to live there.
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And this very real phenomenon has been recycled by COVID “skeptics” into a plausible foundation for their otherwise implausible bullshit of inflated COVID death reports. Of course, the same “conservatives” who love for-profit medicine and deregulation are the ones pushing these conspiracies. And the self-feeding cycle shits out donations coming and going.
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I can unhderstand that the owners like policies like this, but how do you brainwash all the staff to go along with it?
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You make their day-to-day living dependent on compliance by paying a shit wage.
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It goes like this:
"Dear Staff, we are making this change to our patient care/ patient flow. If you do not like it, we understand if you decide to quit and go work elsewhere. "
Shockingly, the same folk that treat staff like that also complain about the high cost of staff turnover.
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At what point do practices like this turn into criminal fraud? Because this would seem to be past that point.
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What we need is to change the incentives. As it stands billing mistakes simply get fixed when caught–there’s no incentive not to try such shenanigans.
We need to make it so that the company that clearly overbills or bills things they shouldn’t have (for example, several years ago my wife had a bill denied as not pre-approved because the pre-approval was somehow issued starting the next day even though it was while she was sitting there in the room) should end up with less than those who did it right the first time.
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We are dealing with that right now. Employer is paying signing bonuses and referral bonuses for nurses, while the current nurses have not had a raise in 2 years and are telling their friends to steer clear of the place. The idea that maybe they should pay the nurses we actually have was rejected out of hand as “that’s not how these tings work.” 
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If you read or listen to the full NPR story the hospital later said that entering through the ER door was not the reason for the emergency services charge. They claimed “the emergency room charge is actually the OB triage little area - before they take you to the labor and delivery room.”
This “OB triage” is not a new service or room in the hospital but it is newly being billed as a separate charge for all deliveries at that hospital’s OB department now, whether or not the mothers enter through the ER door. Obviously it’s a ridiculous bullshit charge that’s indicative of how badly broken our system is.
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so it’s a misogyny surcharge, not just a general fuckery surcharge. got it.
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What we need is single payer. No more of this profitting off human illness bullshit. It’s immoral and inhumane, and frankly, it’s a violation of human rights. No more “well if we just let the markets work as god intended”… no. Fuck no. Single payer is the only moral option in the current capitalist driven world.
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It can be both! (And more). More background on this type of charge from the story:
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The minute we remove the profit incentive from healthcare and do away with private insurance, things like this will cease happening.
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