Crazy hospital bills....

[CosmicCowboy]

Just got the final bill for my last surgery...it's crazy how hospitals and insurance companies do it. This one was to take out the antibiotic spacers and install a new artificial knee. I had the surgery on a Friday and went home Saturday afternoon. Some of the itemized charges were:

surgical recovery room $1512
regular room $1709.
pharmacy $6914.
pharmacy IV solutions $1020
operating room services $25,918
lab work over $5000
knee implant $96,033.
lots of other little charges...

It all added up to $143,321.47

They then "discounted" $99,600.00 to the insurance company which paid $40,115.91

Crazy shit.

[DMX7]

That's just America, baby. Best healthcare system in the world! AND a sale price to boot!

[SnakeBoy]

My wife just had a simple 30 minute procedure that had to be done in the hospital. Doctor's bill was $200, the hospitals bill was $5k.

[boutons_deux]

:lol

And you right-wingers HATE "socialized" medicine, and vote for Repugs who block ANY discussion of govt insurance and govt employees as providers, even if you LOSE $100Ks over your lifetime to wealth-sucking BigInsurance and BigMed

[Trill Clinton]

Just got the final bill for my last surgery...it's crazy how hospitals and insurance companies do it. This one was to take out the antibiotic spacers and install a new artificial knee. I had the surgery on a Friday and went home Saturday afternoon. Some of the itemized charges were:

surgical recovery room $1512
regular room $1709.
pharmacy $6914.
pharmacy IV solutions $1020
operating room services $25,918
lab work over $5000
knee implant $96,033.
lots of other little charges...

It all added up to $143,321.47

They then "discounted" $99,600.00 to the insurance company which paid $40,115.91

Crazy shit.
good for you

[ElNono]

Just got the final bill for my last surgery...it's crazy how hospitals and insurance companies do it. This one was to take out the antibiotic spacers and install a new artificial knee. I had the surgery on a Friday and went home Saturday afternoon. Some of the itemized charges were:

surgical recovery room $1512
regular room $1709.
pharmacy $6914.
pharmacy IV solutions $1020
operating room services $25,918
lab work over $5000
knee implant $96,033.
lots of other little charges...

It all added up to $143,321.47

They then "discounted" $99,600.00 to the insurance company which paid $40,115.91

Crazy shit.

It's ridiculous. They charge that much because they already know how much they're getting post "insurance discount", which is what really covers their cost + profit.

But if you don't have insurance, don't get the "insurance discount" and have to pay out of pocket, they're just ridiculous numbers.

[TeyshaBlue]

:lol

And you right-wingers HATE "socialized" medicine, and vote for Repugs who block ANY discussion of govt insurance and govt employees as providers, even if you LOSE $100Ks over your lifetime to wealth-sucking BigInsurance and BigMed

Shut the fuck up.

[boutons_deux]

Shut the fuck up.

TB :lol GFY So you support the corrupt, predatory, for-profit health care system impoverishing the nation? figures, all you right-wingers suck donkey dick

[cd021]

Got into a wreck last month, Flipped my car. Spent the morning in the hospital cost $32,000 have health insurance so that should cover most of it.

[The Reckoning]

and then people sue the doctors if anything goes wrong so they have to pay malpractice.


doctors and nurses are your friends. it's the hospitals and insurance companies (big businesses) that fuck you over.

[TDMVPDPOY]

any form of insurance is just daylight robbery, just like car insurance

a small bump, they want to replace the whole thing at the repairers and claim the full price instead of buying some used part to fit it in....

[TeyshaBlue]

TB :lol GFY So you support the corrupt, predatory, for-profit health care system impoverishing the nation? figures, all you right-wingers suck donkey dick

Fuck off moron. I'm one of the few and early proponents of single payor.
Your incessant shit takes continue to retard the discussion.
Just shut the fuck up.

[pgardn]

Just got the final bill for my last surgery...it's crazy how hospitals and insurance companies do it. This one was to take out the antibiotic spacers and install a new artificial knee. I had the surgery on a Friday and went home Saturday afternoon. Some of the itemized charges were:

surgical recovery room $1512
regular room $1709.
pharmacy $6914.
pharmacy IV solutions $1020
operating room services $25,918
lab work over $5000
knee implant $96,033.
lots of other little charges...

It all added up to $143,321.47

They then "discounted" $99,600.00 to the insurance company which paid $40,115.91

Crazy shit.

So hopefully the infection is gone.
Hope you have a full recovery.

[TeyshaBlue]

Got into a wreck last month, Flipped my car. Spent the morning in the hospital cost $32,000 have health insurance so that should cover most of it.

You DO NOT want to see the bill for my double bypass last year. Unbelievable.

[pgardn]

You DO NOT want to see the bill for my double bypass last year. Unbelievable.


And hopefully you are up to full speed as well.

[TeyshaBlue]

I was until I read the billing documents.

[pgardn]

I was until I read the billing documents.

Yikes.

Well you are here to pay.
I guess that's a good thing.

[TDMVPDPOY]

so i assume ur next year premiums is going to increase?

[Nbadan]

Don't trust the white devil.....his company insurance paid most of the charges...Afflack paid the rest...and he still wrote off the expenses on his taxes....

[SnakeBoy]

and then people sue the doctors if anything goes wrong so they have to pay malpractice.


doctors and nurses are your friends. it's the hospitals and insurance companies (big businesses) that fuck you over.

It's funny that most people think the doctor is the one pocketing all the money. An office visit to my wife is less than what a plumber charges to spend 5 minutes fixing a leaky faucet.

[ElNono]

It's funny that most people think the doctor is the one pocketing all the money. An office visit to my wife is less than what a plumber charges to spend 5 minutes fixing a leaky faucet.

Family practice doctors, yeah... some specialists though, it's crazy, tbh...

Wife had an endoscopy not long ago, specialist booked her to do the "procedure" on a facility the doc owns, got bills from the specialist, and assistant, the facility, the anesthetist, some other specialist that apparently extracted sample tissue, the lab that analyzed it, yet another specialist that looked over the labs result. We're looking at it, and we're like, there's at least 3-4 people here we didn't even know if they were there or did shit. Everybody charging in the $1k-$2k range, except the lab (~$300)

Fortunately, she has insurance, and it covered the bulk of it. My wife is an RN, and we're looking at the bills, and some shit is shady as hell, not to mention the doc herding patients to his own facility... probably gonna go see a different doc next time.

[The Reckoning]

True. The pediatricians in my family earn a comparatively modest wage and are on call three times a week...very demanding and soul-crushing job imo.

One of my brothers is a specialist and makes mad bank and is never on call. All he does is make schedules and sees patients to establish the doctor-patient relationship, diagnoses, and his assistants take care of the rest. He's a good doc though.

[boutons_deux]

Stay out of hospitals, extremely dangerous to your physical health (hospital-acquired (MRSI), etc infections, avoidable medical errors,etc) and to your financial health.

[The Reckoning]

speaking of which

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/sunday-review/doctors-salaries-are-not-the-big-cost.html?_r=0



http://i60.tinypic.com/5plaj4.png

[Winehole23]

the doc herding patients to his own facilityAtul Gawande talks about this happening in McAllen, TX. The doc puts you on a diagnostic conveyor belt, and touches you up with a bunch of tests performed by his own med center tenants.

[RandomGuy]

Just got the final bill for my last surgery...it's crazy how hospitals and insurance companies do it. This one was to take out the antibiotic spacers and install a new artificial knee. I had the surgery on a Friday and went home Saturday afternoon. Some of the itemized charges were:

surgical recovery room $1512
regular room $1709.
pharmacy $6914.
pharmacy IV solutions $1020
operating room services $25,918
lab work over $5000
knee implant $96,033.
lots of other little charges...

It all added up to $143,321.47

They then "discounted" $99,600.00 to the insurance company which paid $40,115.91

Crazy shit.

I honestly am not sure how Hospitals or health care providers come up with the prices they do.

One of the hallmarks of an efficient free-market is the ability to compare prices.

Try finding the prices for similar operations in other hospitals in your area.

You can't.

This is one of the reasons that our health care system isn't really "free-market". It is about as dysfunctional, efficiency-wise, as it is possible to get.

Another thing to remember, is that there are a lot of doctor groups that are just associated with a hospital, but not actually employees. That means your billing ends up coming from seven or more entities. THAT bit makes me point out that something like 25% or so of all the health dollars go into administrative overhead.

http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/in-the-literature/2014/sep/hospital-administrative-costs

It costs a lot to pay people to be able to fill out claim forms for all the different insurers.

It would be far more efficient to have a single payor system. Dump all the risks into one huge national pool, and let the US government administrate it.

[boutons_deux]

"Dump all the risks into one huge national pool"

ain't NEVER gonna happen in USA, just like the BigInsurance killed public option as soon as ACA discussions got under eay.

The Repugs would block even discussion of "socialized medicine" because it serves, helps the 99% and reduces, limits wealth of the 1%.

iow, BigHealthRacket is just another phallus fucking the unfuckable America.

[cantthinkofanything]

"Dump all the risks into one huge national pool"

ain't NEVER gonna happen in USA, just like the BigInsurance killed public option as soon as ACA discussions got under eay.

The Repugs would block even discussion of "socialized medicine" because it serves, helps the 99% and reduces, limits wealth of the 1%.

iow, BigHealthRacket is just another phallus fucking the unfuckable America.

wait...I'm lost now. Is Big Pharma part of BigHealthRacket?

[boutons_deux]

wait...I'm lost now. Is Big Pharma part of BigHealthRacket?

"now"? how about always?

ctoa is leading member of BigLost

[cantthinkofanything]

"now"? how about always?

ctoa is leading member of BigLost

LOLZ. Nice one.

[boutons_deux]

Air Ambulances Offer a Lifeline, and Then a Sky-High Bill

Clarence W. Kendall, a rancher in Pearce, Ariz., was moving bales on top of a haystack when he fell eight feet and struck his head on the corner of a truck below. His health insurance (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/health_insurance_and_managed_care/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) covered most of the cost of treating the head trauma (http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/injury/head-injury/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier) caused by the accident.

But there was one bill, for $47,182, that his insurance did not pay.

It came from the company that transported Mr. Kendall in a helicopter ambulance to a hospital in Tucson on the day of the fall, nearly two years ago. “That initial bill nearly gave me a heart attack,” he said. “I thought they’d have to come and get me again.” Mr. Kendall has not paid the charge, which he said was equivalent to a year’s income. As a result, Air Methods (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/air-methods-corp/index.html?inline=nyt-org), the nation’s largest air ambulance operator, with over $1 billion in revenue last year, is suing him.

a window into one of the most lucrative booms in health care in recent years. Air ambulance companies, which indisputably save lives, often in dramatic circumstances, have consistently raised their rates and aggressively expanded their networks, adding scores of expensive new helicopters.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2015/04/28/air-ambulance-graphic/3aa504e2a06dcdf50708e36c30c480d955be6217/0427-web-AIRAMBULANCE-600.png

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/06/business/rescued-by-an-air-ambulance-but-stunned-at-the-sky-high-bill.html

[Winehole23]

Spending more on expensive drugs hasn't led to best in class cancer care. Far from it, the US spends astronomically more for middle of the pack results.

So much for high drug prices driving innovation.



Anyone paying attention to the drug pricing debate over the past few decades has heard Big Pharma’s argument ad nauseum: America’s high drug prices foot the bill for global innovation. If Medicare were to join the rest of the world in negotiating lower prices, innovation would dry up and the latest miracle cures (always on the near horizon) would disappear from view.

No field of medicine has been more prone to this psychological blackmail than cancer care. Desperate patients, their families and the patient advocacy groups that speak in their name (almost all of which receive substantial funding from the pharmaceutical industry) have allowed themselves to be used as an effective roadblock to granting the federal government the right to negotiate lower-priced drugs.

The non-policy has proven extremely costly for U.S. taxpayers, who pick up the tab for Medicare and Medicaid; employers, who pick up about 75% of the cost of private insurance; and privately-insured families, who pick up the rest. Spending on cancer drugs accounted for 37% of the more than $200 billion that the U.S. spent on cancer care in 2020. On a per capita basis, that is more than any other country on earth.

A new study out this week sought an answer to a simple question. Are we getting a bang for all the bucks we spend? Have high prices and a lax regulatory environment, which gives Americans earlier access to the latest innovations in personalized medicine that are coming out of the bio-pharmaceutical industry’s labs (monoclonal antibodies, kinase inhibitors, immune checkpoint inhibitors and the latest new new thing, CAR-T therapy), paid off in better outcomes for the people sick with the more than 100 forms of cancer?

The short answer is no. The study compared cancer spending to cancer outcomes at 22 peer nations in the Organization of Economic Development and Cooperation. The U.S. ranked slightly better than middle-of-the-pack when it came to total deaths from cancer per 100,000 population. U.S. costs, on the other hand, were the highest, although Switzerland, another country that invests heavily in its pharmaceutical industry (Roche and Novartis are among the major players headquartered there), is closing in fast.


“After adjusting for smoking, nine countries had lower cancer care expenditures and (emphasis added) lower mortality rates than the U.S.,” researchers at the Yale School of Medicine and Vassar College found. “Of the remaining 12 countries, the U.S. additionally spent more than $5 million per averted death relative to 4 countries, and between $1 and $5 million per averted death relative to 8 countries.”

Their bottom line: Cancer care expenditures were not associated with cancer mortality rates. “Much of the growth in U.S. cancer drug spending … often confers marginal or unclear survival gains,” they wrote.https://gooznews.substack.com/p/little-value-from-high-priced-cancer

The study: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2792761