A hospital emergency room charged me $64 for a pill that costs 0.04 cents at CVS.
Four hundredths of a cent?
Just be glad you aren’t living in Europe, where the elderly die on the street due to rationing.
:rolleyes:
Is this like the old plumber’s joke? 4 cents for the pill; $63.96 for knowing who to give it to?
I got overcharged in the nearby emergency room myself: $6 for an EKG. (I’m a foreigner without insurance; I think it would have been just $1 for a Thai national on a health plan.)
Sadly it’s not abnormal. That 4 cent pill has been bought by the hospital at a greater cost, inventoried, handled and finally given to you at a great markup. I’ve been hospitalized enough times to have seen it before many times.
Now the big debate is *why *the cost is so high. It’s easy to say ‘evil greedy medical system’ but those costs you bear include the hospital’s cost of covering those who won’t or can’t pay for their care, medicare payments that don’t cover the work done and a myriad of other issues.
I am most certainly not defending the practice nor do I wish to get into a discussion / debate / fight over the issue at all, but I do contend that a $64 pill is not as simple as the hospital trying to rip you off.
Not entirely anyway.
Was $64 your total bill for visiting the emergency room?
Actually according to this article, it might be just that simple.
I was going to complain that the link just leads me into an endless “click here for story” loop, but I see it’s only doing that in this Firefox clone. In Chrome it does the “subscribe for article!” announcement.
Did the ER give you the option of getting the pill outside? (Serious question. Sometimes a 4 cent pill delivered at the right time is totally worth $64.) I mean, my husband’s insurance company got charged a pretty penny for 2 liters of sterile saline but that’s just part of the cost of the room and all the fancy equipment that went beep and ping and the attention of very busy doctors who learned that his heart was fine and it was “only” severe dehydration and nothing worse, symptoms to the contrary aside. Everything is more expensive through the ER because you’re taking very valuable time/effort/space.
About 5 years ago, my friend got a chunk of beef lodged in her esophagus in such a way that she couldn’t swallow it down and couldn’t bring it back up. The ER grabbed it with forceps, then billed her insurance $20,000.
Lesson: chew your food.
Shoot, sorry about that - when I first read the article it was the complete article. I assumed it still was.
There was a $64 cover charge, the pill was free. $64 is a bargain for an emergency room visit.
Actually it was .04 for the pill and 63.96 for knowing which pill was needed.
That’s one of the most benign ER stories I’ve ever heard.
The ones I hear on the news tend to be that someone was sent home with a serious illness and no way to seek other care, people were put thousands of dollars into debt and committed suicide, etc.
Price
Availability
Knowledge
Pick any two.
Keep in mind that the hospital charges and what it gets paid (by an insurer, by Medicare/Medicaid, by a private individual) are typically very different. Charges are set (sometimes absurdly) high so as to influence other metrics of a hospital’s business, like Medicare outliers, without the hospital actually expecting to get paid that amount for that service.
Also bear in mind that there are a lot of patients who can’t afford to pay and have no health insurance. Someone has to cover their expense.
I work in the ER, and I work hard at not knowing shit about $.
Having said that, yes, the doctor, nurse, pharmacist, and equipment all have to be paid for.
I would wholeheartedly recommend asking ‘do I really need my first dose here?’
My husband got bitten by a copperhead last summer. Only one fang punctured the skin and he had a neighbor drive him to the local ER. Could’ve driven himself but we have one vehicle and I was 70 miles away in Austin. The doctor drew a circle around the wound and left him in a cubicle. No big deal. When I showed up two hours later, the doctor discharged him. I asked he needed an antibiotic and requested that he get a tetnus shot as he hadn’t had one in at least 10 years." “Naw” said the doctor on duty, 'Just keep off of the foot and it will be fine".
The next morning, his foot was swollen up like an eggplant and really painful. I drove him into Austin and another ER (it was Sunday and the options were limited). The doctor there immediately prescribed antibiotics and an anti-inflammatory medication. The bill from the first hospital-$1,750.00. For drawing a circle with a Sharpie.
Sorry, but that pill was not $64, that was the cost of all of the well trained people who handled that pill coming to you.
I agree that medical costs are high, mainly due to insurance costs. That said, I don’t think $64 for all the training and expertise involved in your care is excessive.
If so, then why lie about it? Why doesn’t the bill list a fee of 4 cents for the pill, and , on the next line, a fee of $64 for the doctor’s time spent with you?
People know that a trip to a lawyer’s office will cost a couple hundred dollars per hour. And most people would be willing to pay similarly for a doctor’s time, too. But nobody wants to pay for an outright lie.