I just took my young adult daughter for her first ‘well woman’ exam.
The office visit was “free,” the 3 month supply of birth control pills were “free,” and the only fee we paid was to the lab, which was inexpensive. Of course, none of this is “free” as I pay quite a bit for our private health insurance.
Everyone thinks that what one pays out of their paycheck is the cost of insurance. This is not true for most. I pay just under $8,000 from my check (and also deductibles and co-pays). My employer pays the rest, and their contribution is $16,000.
The lab bill was about $25.00, but that was just my co-pay. I believe they said the bill was really about $125.00.
I don’t know who calculates that $24,000 a year (plus co-pays and deductibles )is a reasonable amount to pay for health insurance. Perhaps it is. Or maybe it is not.
I do know that the CEO of my insurance company had his pay package triple and nearly quadruple last year (from the year before) to a princley 36 million, not including 11 million in stock, even though he didn’t meet the company performance goals required to get the pay increase and bonuses.
I wish I could get hefty raises like that even when I don’t meet my employers goals.
PLEASE tell me that the U.S. doctor actually didn’t need to rebreak anything because the NHS doctor did a perfectly fine job.
(I got perfectly decent ortho care same-day in England once. The doctor poked and prodded, told I that I probably had plantar fascitis, and instructed me to buy a tube of OTC ointment for 99p. She was right, and I was perfectly fine after staying off it for a few days. Charge: zero. I was perfectly willing to pay, knowing I was a tourist and not part of the NHS system, but they told me it would be more trouble to figure out how to take my 20 GBP than it was worth. Which was still less than the cost of a specialist copay on my insurance at home.)
Urgent care centers are a wonderful idea, but IME they are no more plentiful or conveniently located than ERs, and often have limited hours. Not absolutely everything they would handle routinely can wait until 9:00 the next morning, or Monday.
Well, look at you. If you didn’t go to Harvard or Stanford and use family and school connections to start on the 12th floor and make C-level by 30, what makes you think you deserve to be treated like a human being?
Just the town I live in has four clinics but only one ER. And the situation in the OP is just perfect for a urgent care clinic. If he can wait several days, he can wait until the clinic opens. If it’s infected and threatening to fall off, he can pay the idiot fee.
The city I live in has a number of them, that are open from 7am-11pm, seven days a week. It’s a major city, though, but the smaller city I lived in had several clinics too. One was actually part of the practice my GP belonged to, and it was where you were supposed to go when you woke up in the morning with a fever, or other acute symptoms-- the GP was for follow-ups, yearly physicals, and care of chronic conditions. It was open 8-8, Mon-Sat, and 10-5 Sunday. It had access to all your records that your GP had, because it was part of the same practice. It also stitched minor wounds, and had a lab for blood work, and some x-rays. There were also two free-standing clinics that were open 8am-9pm, seven days a week. There was also a place for psychiatric emergencies that were true emergencies, but didn’t need all the stuff that an ER had, so your bill didn’t include the charge for the overhead that the ER has. And this was a city, but of only about 70,000, many of which were students at the university, which, it’s worth mentioning, had its own clinic.
If the boo-boo on your finger can wait three days, surely it can wait until 8am tomorrow morning.
If what happened was that the guy ignored a fairly serious injury that wasn’t initially an emergency, until it became one, that’s on him. Although, it doesn’t sound like that’s what happened.
I live near Portsmouth, England. Never actually been to Northen Ireland, nor mentioned Ireland in any posts, ever, I think. I’d like to visit some day! (I’ll be in the Republic of Ireland, though, for a few days in September for a conference). Novelty Bobble - Apologies! It’s 30% in total taxes, with part going towards NHS and pension; I was way off! I don’t have a wage slip on hand to check the exact figures, as the most recent months’ worth are at the Home Office right now (spend a day in sunny Croydon on Friday at Lunar House applying for a leave-to-remain visa). There is a deduction on the slip marked as NI – now I’m curious to see how much is taken out as they’ve changed some stuff about our pension deductions at school. Well reminded.
Eva Luna Sadly I heard that tale only from the colleague who led that student group; she swore up and down, though, that the poor kid had her arm reset. I suspect they did have the cast removed and redone, though, and the rest was exaggerated as these tales are.
Most everyone from back home though loves to tell me how shite UK healthcare must be because ‘it’s free,’ though, and that all my teeth are going to rot out of my head because, you know, British dentistry.
When did this happen? and when did the UK health service switch to fiberglass/polyurethane casts? In the 1990s, the US pretty much abandoned using heavy plaster casts for fiberglass casts. The fiberglass casts are superior in a number of ways: they can get wet without being ruined and needing to be replaced, they are breathable, so the skin under the cast sometimes gets rashes, or ends up scaly and nasty. After the removal of a fiberglass cast, the skin usually looks fairly normal. A person stuck wearing a plaster cast in hot weather sometimes sweats, and ends up with skin infections, but sweat evaporates through a fiberglass cast. Weather conditions being different in the US and the UK, if this happened during the transitional period from plaster to fiberglass, maybe a plaster cast was OK in the UK, but not for the weather the student returned to.
My point is, that it is possible that the student returned home with a plaster cast, and if she still had to wear it for several more weeks, perhaps her doctor decided to remove it, wash her arm, and maybe apply Betadine, or something, and then put on a fiberglass cast. As the story was retold, it may have grown into “She had the arm reset,” to “She had it rebroken and reset,” to “It was done on the assumption that the UK couldn’t possibly set an arm correctly.”
I have a cousin who is an orthopod. She has had to surgically “rebrake” and reset bones that were broken and not set in the first place; on the other hand, she has x-rayed bones that were broken, and medical aid was not sought for a long enough time that the bone began to mend without being set by a doctor, and sometimes she has decided not to set them. I’m just guessing, but I think this might be especially true of an arm as opposed to a leg. I find it hard to believe that a doctor would “rebrake” and reset a bone just on the assumption that it couldn’t possibly have been done properly. If it was set by a retired Army medic on a deserted island after a plane crash, and splinted with a seat arm, once the person was home, the doctor wouldn’t just assume it was healing badly; he’d take x-rays, and maybe MRIs.
If it really was reset, then something really was wrong. Maybe that particular doctor in the UK missed something, or maybe the woman wasn’t healing well because of an underlying condition.
Seriously, I honestly don’t know – I was merely repeating an anecdote from a colleague from around 2008. No idea when this occured, what type of cast was used, the relative humidity, etc. Sorry I do’nt have all of the facts and figures; it was part of our own orientation on where to take students if there was an accident or illness during the trip, and to reassure them that they were covered in their fees and that British health care had progressed beyond barber-surgeons (you laugh, but we had students’ parents asking if the kids should pack toilet paper, or would they be able to find it in England. Hey, leaves and twigs are good enough for the natives, so when in Rome…).
I have not taught a study abroad programme at that school for over 5 years now, and I have no idea outside of Casualty how triage and casts work on the NHS, I’m afraid.
So, apologies, was just reporting a second hand story about some hysterical mother in reaction to British health care!
On the other hand, I did have a student sectioned on my watch during one of my study abroads in the UK, and that most decidedly was not covered by the NHS. No further details forthcoming on that one, just to ward off the inevitable interrogation.
Novelty Bobble Ah! My husband’s going through the same process as he’s an independent contractor, so I second-handly sympathise with the accountacy revising! Whenever he tells me he’s got to sit down and do up his paperwork for his accountant, I go out for the day.
To there is any legal system the price will be going up every year to the point not even the upper middle class will have the money to go to the ER.And more and more health insurance companies will cut back and only pay part of the cost or not at all for some treatment.
A lot of doctors like to work private or set up medical clinic there is more profit it that :D:D:D than working at the ER. Also hospital administrations put a cap on the number of doctors and nurses working there at any given time because of the lack of money.
I gruesomely cut the little finger of my left hand on a table saw a while back (I have pictures) and aside from a few bucks for antibiotics, the hospital visits didn’t cost me a cent.
I’ve since recovered with the faintest of scars and an intact bank account. Single-payer rules.
If your injury is not life threatening, and your ER is a trauma center, you may well find yourself waiting quite some time – with medical justification, because triage is the name of the game. Maybe you wait 1-2 hours in the waiting room but once they stick you in a bed, how long it takes you to be seen by an actual doctor who can make a diagnosis and a treatment plan is another matter.
I’ve personally spent 10 hours in the ER at University of Michigan Medical center. I had a soft-tissue injury after falling off a horse – true, I couldn’t walk – but my health was not threatened by the wait, unlike that guy who came in by helicopter with burns on 60% of his body, or the other guy who was homicidal/suicidal. And to be clear those 10 hours weren’t packed with medical attention: the following events happened: 1. they jacked me up on morphine 2. they x-rayed my pelvis and determined it was not broken. That’s about it. I was sent home with crutches and instruction for rest and physical therapy.
My husband spent so many hours at the same ER for a hockey injury, he watched the nursing shift change twice. I think it was about 12-13 hours.
