I believe that the NHS charges around £750 a day for an inpatient. I don’t think this includes Consultant fees or X-rays etc.
Wrong Roosevelt so we can roll it back a couple decades to Teddy’s 1912 Presidential campaign. As I recall from history readings, he was shouted down with accusations of Socialism…
Life saving stabalizing treatment can be had at any Emergency Room, regardless of your ability to pay. That’s the key: stabalizing. If your condition isn’t such that you’re very likely to die of it in the next 48 hours or so, you will be evaluated, given any treatment necessary (oxygen, medication, even surgery if your condition is likely to kill you today or tomorrow), but then you will be told to follow up with your primary physician, whether or not you have one. They often keep lists of low(er) cost clinics that they can give you if you need to find one; generally it takes at least a month to get in, even if you were told to follow up with them in a few days.
Now, the dirty secret no one likes to talk about: some doctors will play the system for you so that you can get further care that the hospital will have to write off (and/or send collection agencies after you, but at least you’ve gotten the care.) It’s not entirely uncommon for someone with chest pains to be admitted for a few days while they set up further test appointments. If you come into the ER with chest pains on a Friday night, they’ll do an EKG and cardiac enzyme markers and give you oxygen and blood pressure medications as needed to stabilize you. They can’t generally do a stress test or cardiac cath to find out *why *you’re having chest pains, though, because those departments are closed for the weekend. If you have insurance, they will send you home for the weekend after making an appointment for a stress test or a cardiac cath as an outpatient on Monday, and your insurance will cover those tests as medically necessary, but not emergent. They’ll bill at the outpatient test rate and everyone’s happy.
Some - not all, but some - doctors will, knowing a patient is without insurance, admit them into the hospital for the weekend. Since they came in through the ER, the hospital will continue to host them and give them meds and do vitals and do that EKG or cardiac cath…even though the person can’t pay. It’s all part of that one emergency visit, and they’ll keep treating you until the doctor discharges you. If he discharged you home from the ER Friday night like the guy with insurance, then you wouldn’t be able to schedule an outpatient test for Monday, because by Monday you’re no longer having an emergency (as evidenced by: the doctor discharged you from the ER). Non-emergency care isn’t yours for the asking; you would be expected to pay for it up front.
(I’ve tried rewording that several times to make it make more sense. Finally, I decided that the situation itself just makes no sense, so the explanation doesn’t either.)
So anyway: if the doctor admits you to the hospital until after your tests, the hospital eats the cost of an 3-4 DAY INPATIENT stay and INPATIENT lab tests (which are billed at a higher rate than outpatient tests, even if it’s the same exact test) on Monday, which add up to far, far more money than if they just ate the outpatient lab test after sending you home for the weekend to sleep in your own bed!
So, good for the patient, not so good for the hospital. And you can only get away with that for so long…even the best doc can’t keep you admitted for the months or years it takes to get a donor organ; sooner or later the hospital’s going to look very closely at the medical condition and stability of the patient who’s boarding with them, and send them home.
Why not? Isn’t that what they do when they have a per night charge for an admitted patient’s room? That’s a couple of grand that’s not attached to any procedures, tests or medications.
But strictly from a logical accounting point of view, aspirin and tongue depressors and latex gloves are so cheap that it costs a lot more for the procedures and work hours to track them to a procedure, than to simply write this stuff off as overhead. When a dozen or more insurance companies are nickel-and-diming the costs and challenging things, it’s simpler to spread the overhead into individual items - hence $10 tongue depressors and $100 aspirin; and odds are a lot of those numbers are again, made up, rather than an honest count of consumables. (“This procedure should have used 3 tongue depressors and two gloves - we’ll bill that way”)
When you have a single payer, who also has full control of the hospital’s total budget, nobody cares what each individual is costing, so much as the aggregate bill.