Based on her statements, it would appear that she is not. Or perhaps she does have it, and it’s not covered.
And yet she appears to live in one of NY’s most expensive neighbourhoods. hmm, I’m still sceptical.
ETA
And her medical bills really came to $127 000? Even more sceptical.
And stop sensationalizing journos from omitting or taking out of context how? I can tell you’ve never dealt with the uncountable sliminess that is American journalism. Your best defense is to keep your mouth shut so they don’t have anything to edit to fit their click-bait ad-selling narratives pandering to shallow rage-a-holics who create the market for yellow journalism.
As someone who’s had “quotes” outright fabricated by journalists (fortunately nothing damning as the topic was innocuous), I can tell you ethical conduct means jack-all to people who have no accountability other than to sources who don’t have their own megaphone by which to issue corrections. If you do get taken out of context, you’re very slightly better off today; you can tweet and hope for the one in a million chance that it goes somewhat viral. Usually though, sleazeball journos only get shamed when a whole bunch of their lies about a whole bunch of people hopefully maybe come back to bite them in the ass down the road after they’ve smeared or fluffed up a career’s worth of bullshit.
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Yeah, it seems to me the way to play it in court if this really was a forced position due to insurance rules is to say the right words, but in a tone that makes it clear why you are doing it. I mean, the jurors were unanimous in very quickly finding for the child defendant instead of the “aunt”, so she now has all the medical bills plus legal bills to show for her trouble.
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Well she’s a white female black-rimmed-glasses-wearing HR manager in NYC who eats hors d’oeuvres. Clearly she must be a horrible human being. #sarcasm
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One of my kids broke my arm this summer. Thanks to ACA, I now have decent insurance that covered the medical costs, but I can tell you two things: 1) $127K doesn’t sound outrageous to me, especially if she had multiple surgeries (not sure WHY she had multiple surgeries for breaking her arm while falling down at a relatively young age), and 2) medical costs vary significantly depending on where you are. The initial costs for me were in a rural area, and I actually laughed when I saw the charges. $35 for x-rays, I kid you not! The costs when I got back to a major city were an order of magnitude higher. If she got her medical care in Manhattan, that $127K actually sounds cheap.
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So can I ask you what the total medical costs were on your kid’s arm?
The ACA helped a lot of people. But health insurance in the country is still so far past fucked up that you’d need the Hubble telescope to spot the light from fucked up.
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But she doesn’t have a cause of action against them. Think about it, it makes sense. If you get in a car accident and you’re at fault, you may have insurance, but they sue you if you don’t pay or the insurance doesn’t cover the balance. The insurance company didn’t get into a car accident, you did. If the insurer refuses to pay for some reason, you have a case against them. But that contract is between you and the insurer, no one else. There is a “bad faith” exception where you sue the insurance company for acting in bad faith, but in most cases you sue the person and the insurance company dispatches a lawyer or settles on your behalf. The alternative is a form of vicarious liability where you can sue someone else who did not cause you harm because they owe you money, for instance.
Mostly this is a product of astonishing medical expenses and the lack of access to affordable healthcare in this country,
ETA:
Tell me about it. Try living in a state that didn’t extend Medicare. Many of these states have clusterfuck high-deductible services essentially designed to benefit private insurers and no one else.
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From one of the articles (can’t remember which one), it sounds like she had to have some stabilizing pins put in (first surgery), and then taken out once she was healed up (second surgery). I had a friend who broke his leg (not even THAT bad) playing hockey in his mid-20’s, and had to get 3 or 4 surgeries as well.
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MY arm! I was able to avoid surgery, but it still came to 4 months of medical procedures, tests, and visits (including occupational therapy). Fortunately the insurance covered it, so I haven’t bothered totaling up the costs to them. But as I said, $127K doesn’t sound outrageous to me, especially for someone getting medical care in Manhattan. I do wonder about the multiple surgeries, though.
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Ah, thanks for the explanation. I must have missed that in my reading.
My guess is that the pins were put in so her arm would heal straight. It may or may not have been necessary. And I was told at the time (I opted for crooked, but of course had to be medically informed about the recommended surgery) that the follow-up “surgery” to take out the pins was in-office, local painkiller, no big deal. Could be her situation was different, but I’m left wondering if she had less than stellar medical AND legal advice.
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No worries. I had to read 3 or 4 different articles, at least, to get the whole picture (like the fact that she filed the suit a full year before the boy’s mother died, just as an example - so that fact actually has ZERO relevance to the story, other than to amp up the outrage factor). Go “journalism”!
I don’t think she had bad legal advice, really. It sounded like it was the only legal option available to her to try to get SOMEBODY to pay for her ridiculous bills. It sounds like the insurance company’s lawyer (it doesn’t say that that is who they used, but I’m guessing) was just better than her lawyer. And really, this seems like kind of a hail Mary any way, a last resort that she likely guessed wasn’t going to succeed in the first place. Maybe now she can use her internet infamy to start up a GoFundMe to pay for her bills.
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YOUR arm, sorry. 127k still sounds absolutely outlandish to me.
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A homophone for “antigen.” Just sayin’.
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ALL American medical bills sound absolutely outlandish to me. When hospitals are ok with charging $25 for a single aspirin, $127k for a couple of surgeries sounds just about right.
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Cough. Splutter.
Good grief.
It costs £1.50 for a bottle of 20 (300mg) at my rather expensive corner store.
Sounds like it’s way past time that Government took control of the situation. Unbelievable.
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Check out this article about the 50 hospitals in the US with the highest markups. The worst offender has a 1,260 per cent markup over costs. Yeah, that’s how you end up with people suing 8 year olds.
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I wonder why they don’t…?
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I grew up in a family of Canadian snow-birds, and all my grandparents friends were also snow-birds, we always knew: if you get sick or injured in Florida, you get in the car and drive north as fast as you can. We had always heard horror stories of our grandparents friends falling and breaking something or having an angina attack or just a bad flu and getting hospitalized for days (godforbid weeks!) and coming out with $20,000 dollar bills. $5 per kleenex. $25 for aspirin. Hell, I’m young and healthy and I won’t go to the USA without travel insurance.
And holy fishsticks… 20/50 of those hospitals are in Florida. My grandparents were right! Get in the car and drive north! Don’t go to the hospitals in Florida!
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