Well see, he works at a hospital so whatever they charge is fair, but whatever anyone else charges for their services is highway robbery.
Well, see, I work in a hospital, and I absolutely cannot believe most of the outrageous charges that I see.
The largest difference I see between the two situations is that if I bring a car into the mechanic there is probably a 95% chance that there is something wrong with it. When one goes to the emergency room there is probably a 95% chance tha person would have been better off staying home.
So $100 for accomplishing something (95% of the time) is harder to digest than $25,000 for accomplishing nothing (95% of the time)? May I suggest that any outrage you feel for hospital billing practices is better informed than your outrage for automotive billing practices? I am not convinced that you were overcharged for the automotive services.
Wow. Just wow. Nice apples to asteroids comparison. It’s horseshit in other words.
First off the doctor is going to have 1-3 initial consults plus several follow ups, and if they are any kind of good business man they will either own or get a referral fee from the Physical therapy of the patient. I would estimate that the surgeon will se about 2K when it is all said and done.
Also you didn’t break out the cost of doing business from the Firestone bill, but you did for the knee/hip surgery.
Nice.
To put it in comparison, the guy working on your car probably made about 2-3 hours labor for the job you described. My most expensive guy would have made between 50-$75, my least expensive guy would have made $32-$48. Which is one hell of a long way from $617, just as $1,430 is one hell of a long way from what the total bill is for a hip replacement.
For a comparison, my wife recently spent 1 night in the hospital for an irregular heart beat.
The paramedic bill was $1,450 (for a 1 mile trip the hospital)
The cardiac guy bill was $400 (2 visits of <15 minutes)
1 other doctor was about $120 for 5 minutes
Oh and the hospital bill was over $10,000
I don’t begrudge the doctors one bit for their charges, they were awesome. The point here is just as the guys at Firestone didn’t pocket the entire $617, the doctors charge was no where near the entire bill.
[Story from my past]
1988, I was working as a line tech, doing a first service on a brand new Volvo. Customer walks back into the shop to chat with me. Since I had done hundreds of these services, my hands pretty much knew what to do, and I kept working as I talked with the customer to answer his questions. Customer watches me and after a bit the following conversation took place
Cust: Do you know that you have better manual dexterity than most orthopedic surgeons?
Me: Bwaaaaht?
Cust: You have better manual dexterity that most orthopedic surgeons.
Me: Gee, thanks, but how do you know that?
Cust: You know those plates, screws, and artificial joints that they install?
Me: Yeah
Cust: I sell those, and I have to go into the operating room to show the surgeons how to install them.
Me: Your kidding, right?
Cust: Nope, and you are better with your hands than most of them.
Me: Cool, thanks.
[/SFMP]
So if you think I make more than an ortho surgeon, it’s because I am better with my hands. 
Anyway The surgeon only has one model to work on, I get new ones every couple of years.
And he’ll bitch about it even when he gets a discount for being a hospital employee.
It’s so unfair. :rolleyes:
Most chain auto parts stores will check your engine codes for free. You also can buy code checkers.
Regardless, the results are always the same. At least $500 to get it fixed.
Having a code read for free can be a valuable service. My current car, with 231K miles on it, had the check engine light come on a couple years ago, about a month after getting an emissions inspection. Advanced Auto Parts, for free, told me I needed a new catalytic converter. As the car was running fine, it was clear to me that this was not an issue, and I chose not to get it fixed until the next inspection was due. Since the car was still running, that turned out to be a questionable decision, I had to pay to have it done anyway. However, it could have potentially saved me $450 by allowing me to not repair what was essentially a computer error.
Thanks to the internet, I have saved literally thousands of dollars fixing appliances around the house. My guess is that in many cases the codes captured can be easily fixed by non-professionals such as myself with minimal expense and effort.
Last, why in the world would this car information be hidden from me. Posts have talked about 3 thousand dollar “professional” code readers. The only reason I can think of that you cannot just push a button and get a printout (in English) of exactly what the problem is and how to fix it is that while the pertinent legislation was going through congress auto parts makers and mechanics insisted on the system as it exists, rather than as it should be.
sigh
This story is an urban myth with a kernel of of truth. In the 1980’s and early 1990’s there was a few widely reported cases where salesmen for orthopedic surgery devices would either be in the operating room to advise the surgeon on exactly how to use his machines, or in a few rare cases actually perform the surgery. The big problem here was that the incidence of post op infections increased each time the OR door was open during a surgery. Because of this, and not because it resulted in less desirable surgical results, this is now universally prohibited. Given the fact that an auto mechanic uses many more and different tools much more frequently than a surgeon it would be surprising that the mechanic would not be more dextrous.
35 years ago, when I was helping to remove a metal plate from a bone the Philips head screw driver I was using was branded “Craftsman”
And a last point is that I do not feel that I was ripped off. The ignition coils seemed to run about $100 each on the internet so I think my total bill was reasonable. I am not used to paying to have my car diagnosed, I did not used to have to pay, and it just does not feel right to me. Clearly, today, that is just how things are done.
Also, the salesman was not teaching the orthopod how to use a screwdriver or reminding them to unscrew counter-clockwise, as your story implies. They were assisting in operating $100,000 osteotomes that would shave the native bone just right.
You can save even more money if you just assume that that every time the CEL turns on and the car is ‘running fine’ it’s probably the computer that’s wrong and you can just go ahead and ignore it.
Yes, mechanics do use a more expensive OBD-II reader, but you can go to an auto parts store and buy a cheap consumer one for $30 or $50 or as you’ve said yourself, take it to an auto parts store and they’ll read the codes for free, so I’m not really sure why you’re complaining. These codes aren’t hidden, they’re right there for the taking. You can get a Chilton or Haynes manual that will tell you how to remove and replace virtually every single part on your car and just about every one of those parts is available to the end user at an auto parts store or the junk yard.
The problem is, even with the internet, the Haynes manual and your OBDII reader…matching up a code and a symptom to an actual broken part is tricky and replacing a part isn’t always easy. You are certainly allowed to do it yourself. At this point it becomes a trade off. Spend all weekend working on your car tracking down the exact problem and replacing parts until your get it or let someone else do it in a few hours and get it right the first time because the have the training and experience. You might get it right on the first try and only spend an hour on the project or you might not and end up spending all weekend on your back in your driveway because you don’t have a lift in your garage.
You paid, it just wasn’t detailed on the bill. Someone still had to put time into figuring out what was wrong with your car and his time wasn’t free. Even if he told you what was wrong after tinkering for an hour and you could walk out and take the car elsewhere without paying anything, overall the fees at the shop (at all shops most likely) where higher to cover this ‘complimentary’ service. Just like batteries plus has to charge a big more for a few items to cover checking your battery for free and autozone has to make a bit more in certain areas to not lose money pulling codes and checking alternators.
If you don’t believe me (and most people don’t) you don’t know how a business is run. There’s no such thing as a free service. It all gets paid for, by the consumer somewhere, somehow if the business wants to keep the lights on. It’s basic accounting. There’s no two ways around it. If you give stuff away for free and don’t make it up somewhere else you can’t afford your overhead.
First, I absolutely do assume that if the CEL illuminates and the car is running fine then there is nothing to check. I learned this by having gas caps not screwed on tightly, and a bad converter. In both of those cases there was nothing wrong with the parts of the car that I considered important, AND, I would have considered it an egregious waste of money to have spent $200 finding out what the problem is.
And yes, you can go to some effort and determine what the codes mean yourself. My question is why this is “hidden in plain sight” and not immediately available at the push of a button. My supposition that it is a sign of greed remains unabated.
I went to a specialist once because of trouble with my ankle. The fucker wanted to charge me nearly £300 to do an MRI on it, and then it would have been £2500 to have keyhole surgery to go in and fix the problem.
Price gouging fucker. I could have just went to my GP and he could have diagnosed it for free.
Turned out to be splinters on a bone rubbing against cartilage, sure I could have told him it was that, he probably knew that straight away but still wanted to charge me for the scan. Disgraceful.
Your point is well taken. Let me just say, it did not seem like I was paying because the mechanic would take the car in, call me to tell me what was wrong, and I would always tell him to fix it please. And they did fix it. So, in my mind, the diagnosis was free, the treatment costs, but at the end of the month there had to be a profit for the owner, so you are right, I am just convincing myself.
A bad CC usually indicates something is wrong upstream.
Since they can’t have sensors on every single part on your entire car and since the sensors can only relay so much information back to the computer, they do the best they can and let people that have been trained figure out the rest. It’s like a patient that walks into an ER that says “I have a pain here and here and hurts when I do this and this” and the trained doctors and nurses do a few tests and make a diagnoses and recommended a solution. It would be a lot easier if the patient could walk right into the OR and schedule the surgery that he’s going to need but all he knows is where it hurts not why it hurts. Just like all the car knows is where the trouble is and vaguely what it is not why it is.
For example. The gas cap thing. IIRC, the code is the same code you get for any loss of pressure in the fuel system. The car doesn’t know if the gas cap is loose or the gas tank has a hole in it or any other number of things that could be wrong. But that’s a bad example since it’s so common and I think some makers have added a sensor to that gas cap with a light on the dash to alert the driver to that problem.
Well, as far as I can tell, my bad cc was just a worn out device. There was never any hint of any other problem. I assume I was lucky in that.
I am self employed in my own small one bay shop. It only takes one visit from customers like the OP for me to realize that I am far too busy to take on their jobs even if my shop is empty and I am doing nothing at the time.
About the “running fine” remark.
This has to be one of the most elastic terms a car owner uses. I think many car owners throw up “running fine” as some type of amulet to ward off evil mechanics.
I have seen cars that would not rev even half way to red line, cars that misfired so badly the driver’s seat felt like a magic fingers bed in a cheap motel, and cars that took 5 or 6 prolonged attempts to get started all being described as “running fine”.
Obviously these are definitions of the term I was not previously aware of. 
I’m at a dealer, advantage here goes to the independent. I wish I was too busy sometimes.
Actually he went on to tell me about how when placing a plate or rod how the surgeon gets one shot at placing the screw correctly and it it is done incorrectly the patient suffers.
Along the same lines, I lacerated three fingers once that needed stitches. The HMO kicked me out of the ER and sent me to a “surgeons” office to get sown up. If I had known then what I know now I would have never have left the ER. I needed a plastics guy, I got a butcher.
This guy goes to sow me up. Now at the time of the injury I had spend about 5 years as an automotive instructor. I watched people work with their hands for a living. This guy was a piece of work. First off he worked with his tongue stuck out of the corner of his mouth, just like a 4 year old kid learning to use a screwdriver. :eek: Secondly I am not a doctor, I don’t play on on television, but I can tell you his manual dexterity was so bad, he would never make it as an auto mechanic. I would have failed him out of my class.
Finally the next day, I had his work inspected by a plastic surgeon, the nurse unwrapped my finger and her comment was “Boy he really fucked you up.”
Believe me I would not let this guy take out my trash, much less ever work on my body again.
First off all of these fault codes and the method of access are part of Federal law. so if you don’t like it, call your Congress critter. Car makers would love to not have to fuck with this shit, but the law is the law.
Back when On board diagnostics first started, on many cars you could access the codes via the car itself. Cadillac for instance required a few button pushes on the climate control panel. With the rest of GM a bent paper clip inserted in a connector would cause the check engine light to flash, you counted the flashes. Flash space flash flash was a code 12 which if IRC was no crank signal, or the key was on, but the engine was off.
However regulations got more complex, and emissions got tighter, it was no longer possible for all the codes to be displayed via a flash code. On my personal car there are somewhere around 435 engine fault codes with various sub conditions, so the total is somewhere around 600+ engine codes, plus the transmission codes that can trigger a CEL, so there are about 700+ things that can trigger a CEL on my car. Add to that (just for fun) another 400-500 codes for the rest of the systems in the car, a modern car is complex. Mind numbingly complex. My car has 24 computers working via three networks, a high speed, a mid speed and a low speed network. Plus quite a few “dumb” units that could probably be called computers, but they don’t quite have the horsepower of the other units, so we don’t call them that.
Now Congress actually did something nice for the consumer (it was an accident I’m sure) They mandated that all cars be accessible via a generic scan tool, so that independent shops don’t have to buy manufacturer level tools. This law was to cut the cost to the independents, but it also lowers the price to the consumer and gives them more choice as to where to take the car for repair.
There is still a difference between the $30 scan tool and the multi thousand dollar one at the Firestone shop or at the dealer.
Buy a $30 dollar tool it will give you codes from the ECM and TCM. This may help you fix the car or not.
Buy a more expensive tool ($100) it might read ABS and it might give you up to the 4 legally required frozen values stored in the computer.
Go to your local Firestone dealer and you will see a tool that costs somewhere between $2,000 and maybe $12,000 dollars. It will read codes, frozen values and probably allow the technician to view some live scan data. It will probably have some diagnostic flow charts in it to recommend tests to help pinpoint the actual fault. Good tool, but it will only read the powertrain, ABS, and maybe the body control computer. The other units in the car will remain unreadable. It may allow for reprogramming of some control units.
Fast forward to the manufacturer level tool, it will read ALL the control units in the car, it will give up to 20 frozen values from when the fault occurred, it will tell if the fault is permanent or intermittent, it will give counters about how many times the fault has occurred, how many key cycles ago the fault first occurred, and how along ago the fault last occurred. In addition there is upwards to another 200 current running parameters that can be accessed to view how the system is operating now. It will allow reprogramming of all the control units, it will have a full diagnostic library to assist in the fault tracing, and may have a guided diagnostic mode that starts with the technician entering the symptom as described by the customer, where it guides you step by step though the diagnostic process.
the problem with these tools is they are manufacturer specific. A GM tool won’t work on a VW. To get manufacturer level tools, you have to buy one from each manufacturer. This gets spendy.
So far from being hidden, the information is there, you just have to have equipment to be able to access it. Arguing that it is hidden, is like saying information on the web is hidden because you have to buy a computer to access it.
So how would you like us to display this information?