Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/08/man-gets-treated-in-hospital-f.html
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gets a bill for $618,967.78
And those blood suckers will chase him to the ends of the Earth for it.
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Looks like he only had to pay $1K, if I read the statement correctly.
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Conservatives: Young people paying close to $600 for a new phone is excessive. They should learn to cut back.
Also conservatives: A hospital charging $600,000 to treat somebody’s knee isn’t excessive. Young people should shut up about how much things cost.
While i’m on the topic… $990 for “nutritional services”? Where they serving him wagyu beef with truffles in a cream sauce prepared by a Michelin star chef for every single meal?
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Someday when the USA joins the rest of the civilized world with universal health care for every citizen we won’t see these stories any long. Some day…
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$990 for a month (29 days, based on the date range given on the bill, close enough) of hospital food, 3 meals a day. That’s about $34 per day or $11 per meal. That is a little expensive, but considering how carefully they need to adhere to dietary restrictions to ensure they don’t harm the patients I don’t think it’s wildly unreasonable. After all, Rachael Ray ate on $40 per day.
$3,180 of pharmacy services per day, though – hopefully he got the GOOD medication for that price!
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I think the 2nd statement shown is for the elderly relative referenced in the write-up, not the knee infection.
I’m curious what the difference is between “therapy services” and “therapeutic services,” anyone know?
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Mr. Raccoon. $990 for “nutritional services” over 4 weeks is $35 per day and probably the most reasonable part of the bill… Maybe it just sounds like a lot because you are a raccoon and used to eating from the garbage for free? haha. I kid. I kid.
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I’ll boycott these high prices by not getting emergency care. I also need to make sure I’m not embalmed or cremated because that’s a scam too.
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I misread a article a tiny bit and thought it was for a week not a month. Even though it was for a month, those must have been some pretty pricey fruit cups
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My father in law got a knee replaced a while ago, and when they looked at the bill, they got charged like $100K for staying in intensive care. He was never in intensive care, so he called the hospital to report the error. Their response: “Medi-Cal already paid for it, so meh.”
And that was that.
Our system is awful.
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I’m skeptical, we never had an interest in joining. The “civilized world” has openly mocked Americans for centuries on our uncouth ways. Unless what it means to be civilized changes dramatically I don’t see any way for American culture to shift in a way that will satisfy the elite attitudes of the West.
Up until fairly recently, cities were population sinks. It was much healthier to stay in the countryside. To become civilized is to invite death.
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And yet, it is expensive. I don’t want to know how much of a bill I ran up this year, three months in the hospital and three months in rehab getting back to walking. Endless meals and peripheral staff, my own room, ten weeks of dialysis, endless doctors and nurses. Being alive, it turns out, could be very costly. But when I landed in the hospital, I was in bad shape.
Yes, Canafa has “free” health care, in quotes because it’s being paid for somewhere. But ultimately it is expensive and maybe some if the fuss should be about the actual cost. Health insurance just shifts the cost elsewhere. How can things be streamlined? Maybe some things are overpriced, but labor alone brings high prices. You can’t expect people helping you, even the “menial” workers, to not have a liveable wage. Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to expect long life, though I don’t want others making that decision, or for people to have to make that decision for themselves.
One amusing thing was that whike I was still in the hospital, the hodpital foundatiob sent me mail asking for a donation. Seemed a bit premature, though I got two more if the letters since.
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That’s not really true. We have evidence that we’ve lived in villages and cities from prehistory. I’m not certain exactly what you mean by countryside, but there are some huge survival advantages to living in a village versus a family living alone.
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Duh…second grade math tells me it’s $1,955
/s
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Ed Tufte included a nice example of this in his data visualization book “Envisioning Information” (his masterpiece). David Hellerstein’s original article “The Slow, Costly Death of Mrs. K____” (1984), shows an annotated hospital bill, laying out the cost of all of the treatments Mrs. K received prior to her death. It’s grim, and expensive, stuff.
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I don’t see that anyone is arguing that skilled medical care should be “cheap”. The issue in the US is that medical bills are padded, sometimes to the tune of 1000% or more, above the actual cost of the good or service rendered. Canada, and every other country with socialized medicine has removed the profit motive that keeps medical bills astronomically high in the US.
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That theory is known as the “urban graveyard effect”
As a Canadian living in the US, I can tell you the problem lands squarely on the private insurance industry. If you take them out of the equation for basic health care coverage, the US would turn around it’s dwindling life expectancy overnight and medical bankruptcies would vanish.
Hospitals would have to charge according to what the single payer, in this case the government, would be willing to pay. For its Medicare and Medicaid socialized medicine programs, the costs are kept reasonably low, but most people have to fend for themselves.
As it stands now, private insurance companies perversely want hospitals to charge even more than they do both because it forces people to buy insurance to get the insurance-only discount, but it also lets insurance companies keep more money of the 20% profit they’re legally limited to (i.e. getting more pie by making a bigger pie).
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