WTH??
I’m at a loss for words on this one. Where should we begin? $180 for a shot? $242 for supplies (a few bucks of gauze and sterile pads). That’s outrageous enough. But a $8200 ER room bill? :eek:
Is it this outrageous everywhere? Is the ER absolutely off limits unless you want to be financially ruined? Imagine what these fuckers would have charged for x-rays and stitches. You’d be wiped out. Everything you had saved, gone.
You don’t want to know how much they charge to put that back on.
Maybe if he went to his own doctor when it happened, he wouldn’t be out so much.
The article says he waited several days. It was no longer an emergency, therefore his insurance had no obligation to pay for an out-of-network ER visit.
It’s like an O. Henry story. He injures his middle finger right when he needs to use it most.
I think I’ve been told by at least one candidate for public office that every American has access to medical care. If they don’t have insurance, all they have to do is go to the emergency room. But maybe I misunderstood.
Or if he went to an ER in his insurance company’s network, it wouldn’t have been so much. Note that after his insurer paid its portion of the bill, the remaining portion was forgiven by the hospital, after the TV station contacted them about it.
A lot of Primary Care Physicians these days don’t stitch up wounds in their offices anymore. PCP’s are mostly there to diagnose and prescribe routine medicine. Anything more and they issue referrals. I’m sure some PCP’s might bandage a superficial wound. Anything deep and they may pass the buck with a referral.
I went to mine with a gashed leg about 7 years ago and the doctor’s nurse clumsily bandaged it. It came loose by the next day and I had to rebandage it myself.
Finding a real GP that does real family medicine is nearly impossible.
For the win.
Hey, it’s New Jersey. Someone has to pay for all those endless MRIs, lumbar taps and organ transplants House’s team threw around like, well, band-aids and antibiotic gel.
There’s also urgent/critical care clinics that are in-network (probably not all plans).
I had a case of pinkeye a few years ago, $10 co-pay and the cost of antibiotic drops.
This is New Jersey. He needs that finger to drive.
What is there to understand? He went to the emergency room and received medical care, just like the candidates said.
This can’t possibly be normal. I admit it’s been years since I had to visit a ER. I’d fully expect a bill over $2000 just to get a sliced finger attended too.
You start charging $9000 and people will have to forgo medical care. My wife and I will be talking tonight. No matter how sick we get we’ll have to somehow tough it out until we can get in to see our PCP. Some critical injuries will force someone into the ER no matter what. It takes too damn many years to save 15,000 or 20,000 to have it wiped out like this for something trivial like a cut finger. It’s unbelievable and crazy.
I’m hoping and praying it’s not this insane at my local hospital ER’s. Supposedly my insurance covers a lot but with my deductible and the max the insurance can make me pay out it could easily cost me thousands.
And his resulting poverty was his own damn fault, too.
These days, ER visits are for serious emergencies. If it’s not life-threatening, you go to an urgent care center. My insurance has reasonable copays for urgent care visits, but the ER visits will cost you. If you’ve waited around for days, why go to the ER instead of an urgent care? Go to the ER when you are bleeding to death, not when you need a few stitches.
Until this thread I had never heard of an Urgent Care Center. I’m not sure there are any here. Something I need to check on.
So everybody thinks it’s just fine and dandy for the ER to charge $8000 just to see a patient? Remember we all ultimately pay that cost through our insurance premiums. I think it’s outrageous myself.
The ultimate slap in the face is this guy was treated by a nurse. His 8000 bucks bought him a few minutes of a nurse’s time.
From the article:
A well-meaning law that was nearly certain to produce this outcome.
I fully knew that stepping foot in the ER is probably going to land at least a $5000 bill on your head. You better damn well need it when you go in. The whole idea of an ER is that it’s there if you think you are about to die. It’s a “rush fee” of sorts. Going in there means that if you are in mortal danger, people will literally drop what they are doing and use any means at hand to save you. People normally off work would be called in that minute if it means saving your life. That sort of “service” demands a high price in a for-profit environment.
If you don’t think you are going to die or need that kind of instantaneous care, wait in line at the urgent care clinic or your GP.
Of course, part of the ER problem is that a lot of patients will go there when they don’t have a life threatening problem, and then renege on the payment because they cannot afford it. Some hospitals are so grateful if you keep up with a basic payment plan that after a little while they’ll waive the rest that you owe because it’s still ten times more than they ever thought they’d get.
The other part of the issue is since we are not all doctors, we don’t all know when a problem is life-threatening enough to choose between the $500 option and the $5000 option. We might go to the ER unnecessarily or end up at the urgent care clinic when we cannot afford to wait at all. How many people have died in an urgent care clinic because the hefty ER price tag swayed them away from that choice?
All medical charges are (or appear to be) outrageous, all the time. When you’re covered, it’s no big deal. When you’re not covered, you go to the news and complain. Or maybe have a benefit dinner. When you’re covered and you happen to see a bill, it’s outrageous but there’s no spaghetti dinner.
This is just…so not news. Medical care costs in the US are ridiculous.
I agree wholeheartedly with the part I bolded. I don’t think I could live in the States, the healthcare thing is too complicated. With the co-pays and the networks and everything. Here (in Canada), if you go to the ER with a cut on your finger, you’re going to wait a hell of a long time (until there are no actual emergencies left, I’d guess), but when you get home after your tetanus shot and band-aid, the bill you’d receive is the same as if you went to your family doctor: $0.00 (Canadian, which funnily enough works out to $0.00 U.S.).
[QUOTE=Macca26]
The other part of the issue is since we are not all doctors, we don’t all know when a problem is life-threatening enough to choose between the $500 option and the $5000 option. We might go to the ER unnecessarily or end up at the urgent care clinic when we cannot afford to wait at all. How many people have died in an urgent care clinic because the hefty ER price tag swayed them away from that choice?
[/QUOTE]
No shit! It’s way too complicated. Patients shouldn’t have to make those kinds of decisions.
Sorry, I don’t mean to turn this into the “whose health care is better” debate, but I sometimes wonder if Americans realize just how bizarre the system seems to an outsider looking in.
This simply isn’t true. And whether you go to the ER depends on a few things, including whether you know how serious your own injury is, and also what time the injury occurs, because that will determine what other options might be open.
About seven years ago, i got bitten by a dog while jogging. He got me on the upper thigh. When i got home, my first inclination was just to wash it out and go to the doctor the next day, but my wife looked at it and insisted that we go to the ER. Also, it was after 7.30 in the evening, and my university’s Health Center, which would have been my usual first port of call for such a problem, was closed.
I’ve always believed that you should not clog up an ER unless absolutely necessary, so when we arrived and a triage nurse asked me what the problem was, i explained it to her, and i also told her that i was happy to leave if she didn’t think it was serious enough to warrant a visit.
I also knew that i might be in for a long wait if a bunch of actual emergencies came in, but the triage nurse actually fast-tracked me, and told me that it was good that i had come in, because it’s best to do a deep irrigation of a dog bite quickly, before infection has a chance to set in. The physicians’ assistant who tended to me flushed the wound with iodine, bandaged it, and gave me a tetanus shot.
As for the $5000 bill, there wasn’t one. I think the total bill was somewhere between $400 and $500, my insurance covered all but $120, and i collected the balance from the owner of the dog.