I went to the emergency room yesterday. I contributed to the skyrocketing cost of medical care in this country. I pulled resources better spent on those who truly need it. I took a day off from work, inconveniencing myself and my employer, who will pay me for a day in which I did no work. I had no choice, but it didn’t have to be this way. Not to mention the 8 hour wait because I was not really in need of emergency care.
My mattress bit me. A spring sprung right through the bedding and poked a hole in my side Tuesday night. By Friday I knew it was infected so I called my doctor. The office is closed and will remain closed for a week. The next appointment available to me was in a week and a half.
I am diabetic. I have already had cellulitis and I am not about to go through that again if I can help it. My doctor’s office advised me to go to the ER if I felt the wound was really infected, so I did.
I have worked in the health insurance industry. I know how much unneccessary ER visits costs. The football injury on Sunday afternoon. The panicky new mothers with feverish infants at 2 am. The exploding cysts.
The cost to everyone for my stupid visit, multiplied by several thousand stupid emergency room visits is staggering. THERE HAS GOT TO BE A BETTER WAY!
This mini-rant bought to you by one disgusted American healthcare user.
Yeah it was infected. Had it drained, got antibiotics. Cost? About $5000
Holy shit, $5000 ??? :eek: How does that break down?
Luckily there is a walk-in clinic in the hospital here which doesn’t get much business so they are happy to see me and never give me trouble about not having a referral from my PCP. I just have to pay the office co-pay and extra for x-rays, etc.
I hear you on the wait–12 hours for me for pinkeye (I didn’t know what it was and was scared enough in the middle of the night to go to the ER) in DC as the gunshot victims went by.
** KneadToKnow **, what’s a doc-in-a-box? wring. Apparently not. Her office told me the next available visit was next Saturday. Waaay too long a wait. I would have really needed emergency services by then.
I know at the clinic in my hometown, they had an “urgent care” clinic where stuff that falls under the “not-quite-emergency” label was seen; you’d walk in, check in at the desk, and patients would be triaged based on complaint and arrival time. I wonder if a medical center in your area might have a service like that.
If I had an exploding cyst (ugh!), I certainly wouldn’t consider a ER visit unneccessary! Most people cut themselves and see blood gushing out, they dont sit there and think, gee it looks a lot worse then it is, I don’t want to bother anyone, I’ll just wrap it up here. Of all the things my tax dollars go to, at least I can go to a place to get medical treatment whether its deemed neccessary or not. The system isn’t perfect by a long shot, but it’s a hell of a lot better then some other places.
Let me clarify a bit. The cost to me is $35-- my ER co-pay. I have medical insurance. However, I worked for Empire BC&BS and I know that the hospital charges for ER services was $3500. That did not include doctor’s charges or lab fees. And that was about 10 years ago.
“The emergency room visit, plus ambulance, to Medicare, might cost $2,000 or $3,000”
None of these are definitive, of course.
In any event, the larger point that Biggirl is making is true - ER visits are extremely expensive and are unnecessarily wasteful - for this reason many insurance plans charge special copays ($35 or $50) for ER visits that do not result in admission.
DeniseV beat me to it; don’t they have urgent care clinics in NYC? They were all over Northern VA, and I think they’re fantastic. Perfect for things like your infected wound-- I’d always go to one when I got a UTI, since that’s something that’s not life-threatening, so it doesn’t warrant a trip to the ER, but also can’t wait a week or more for an appointment with the doc.
Humm. Here in Canada there are walk in clinics. You just walk in, see a GP and away you go. Kinda like one of those SuperCuts hair places - no appointment necessary. The wait is usually about 1/2 an hour. If it’s longer you can leave and come back at the appropriate time. They’re usually located in malls, so it’s a good chance to do som shopping.
Last I heard, a vist to a walk in clinic gets bill to Alberta Health for $19. An emergency room visit has a base bill of $278. Clearly not $5,000, but still quite a bit more. (My SIL is Japanese and when she moved here she was on a visitors visa and had to pay for her health care, hence I know the rates - this was about 6 years ago, however).
It’s funny how the health insurance (HMO) company I have writes up what is emergency-room worthy. Even a broken bone after hours has to wait until your PCP can look at it. Only if the situation is life-threatening can you go straight to the ER without the PCP’s referral and expect to pay only the co-pay.
from the FAQ’s for my plan:
This last part must be why the walk-in clinic is OK. That’s where I go for ear infections, flu, to check on whether a sprain is in fact a break, etc.
Biggirl, I’m glad you had insurance for this! $5000 seems like a lot, but it must be that ER thing. Even having a baby is “only” the $8-10K range, right?
Hmmm. Living in New York must be incredibly expensive. Hospital charges here are very, very, very expensive. 10 years ago one inpatient day costs around $1500. Again this is only hospital charges. Let me clarify further-- hospital room charges.
Doctor’s fees, medicine, lab and x-rays— all seperate charges. And boy did our customers explode if they ever saw an itemized inpatient bill. 7 dollars for asprin. $350 for crutches.
There was a study done that said that many private hospitals subsidize other portions of their facilities by charging Medicaid ER rates for non-emergency ER visits. Let me see if I can find that.
P.S. Here in NY there used to be a patient rights bill. This bill stated that all charges must be posted in plain sight in the emergency room. This apparently does not apply to websites, because none that I visited posted their fees.
Yeah, all healthcare stuff here is covered. Also, our ERs are pretty damn overtaxed (at least in Montreal) but we have walk=in clinics and CLSCs (provincially-run walk-in clinics) sprinkled about the city.
According to this report NYS spends more than any other state for Medicaid. 2.5 times the average for Medicaid yet physicians are reimbursed at one of the lowest rates in the country.
This really does speak to hospital costs here.
Urgent care centers would help that considerably.
I would dispute this. Medical costs in NY are higher than the national average, but not by a tremendous amount. In quickly scanning through the linked report, I did not see them attribute the high cost of Medicaid to high medical costs - rather, they linked it to over-utilization of services. They noted - among other things - that Medicaid is a far more generous plan than any of the private insurance plans that they looked at. They recommended introducing managed care and (I think) more careful screening for eligibility)
