McClatchy:
SACRAMENTO -- For five desperate minutes, emergency room doctors at UC Davis Medical Center frantically tried to revive Scott Hawkins.
$29000 bill for 5 minutes in ER shines light on health costs ...
$29000 for 5 minutes in the ER raises health care questions ...
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Suppose I should be glad my last ER visit, I mostly waited for about 5 hours, and the bill was smaller. So, when will the detailed itemized bill in this case be available for review?
I think if everyone canceled their healthcare insurance and paid out of pocket we could get universal insurance. I have no healthcare I'm middle-aged I pay for my doctor visits at the time of service, I go twice a year and pay $57 a visit. If your paying over $5000.00 a year for premiums and then your co-pay and you go to 2-3 $60.00 doctor visits that year you are a fool. I know you pay the insurance premiums just in case but even then you have no real guarantees your covered. If one person can go without so can we all. If the insurance companies had no customers we could drive them out of business. Healthcare is not the same as buying a couch it should now and forever be a non-profit business. I would tell anyone who is sick and their insurance is covering the bills to stay but all healthy people should stop paying until we get this into non-profit universal healthcare which is good for all.
I come back to the same question I asked a few months ago - what is the real cost of these services & how to find out? The uninsured get charged $29 k for this work, the insurance company would reimburse the hospital a heck of a lot less. You can't comparison shop if you don't know the real cost of health care (which is a plan suggested by many republicans), though I know it would not be realistic in a case like this. Still, If I worried about needing heart attack care in the future, how do I decide what hospital to go to? The insurance exec who went on Bill Moyers talked about the kind of plans we will have more of in the future (regardless of health insurance reform) will force more of us to be "informed" consumers of health care & pay for more of it ourselves so we will need to comparison shop. But how?
This is another reason why we need Public Option in the Health Care Bill. The family should not
pay this Bill....I'm sure Canada and Europe don't even have this issue.
Hospitals can Bill the De@d all they want....But you can't make them Pay! And you can't MAKE anyone else Pay!
They may be able to take it from their estate.
I have a hunch that the late 23 year old college student did not have a significant estate.
And if he did, he won't be needing it anymore.
Greed
And the willing fools who pay so that the greed just grows and grows.
A hospital billed my insurance company for $2800 for an MRI and a mammogram about 5 years ago. My insurance paid $800 for the tests but if I had been uninsured I would have owed the whole $2800. All I could think was, who is really paying for the insurance that people have? It looks like the hospitals and doctors are using the uninsured to subsidize the insured to the tune of about 70%. I have no idea how much would be charged today, 5 years later but I'm sure it has really gone up.
And one hears from the re thugs that the uninsured have medical care namely they can use emergency rooms..............so that they can add to the growing number of people to file for bankruptcy because of medical costs. Perfect solution :-(
America's new health care slogan: "If you have to ask, you can't afford it
hm, yeah, best in the world? We are broken
they should be happy it is not $2.9 million; you got love them super greedy doctors...
Yeah, blame the doctors, cause, you know, they are the ones filling out the billing info and mailing that stuff out. Think about things before you post please.
"What's more, the Hawkins case may be a dramatic and brutal example of the wide disparities in the sticker price for medical care provided to those with insurance and those without it.... Part of the outrage is that those with the least are charged the most."
This is a huge problem, and it is NOT confined to dramatic cases like this.
Those without insurance coverage are discriminated against by pharmacies every day.
With insurance your total cost (copay + benefit) will be a whole lot less then your cost without insurance coverage.
And pharmacies and drug companies are unapologetic about this discrimination.
This is yet another reason why passage of significant health care reform is so important.
Under the current system, most insurance is available through employment.
If you lose your job, then chances are that you lose your insurance benefits. Sure, you can buy COBRA benefits for 18 months... if you can afford to pay the much higher premiums without your paycheck.
What a tangled web has been woven in this complex universe of health care. Some people complain that the House bill was 2000 pages. I find it a wonder that they could limit it to 2000 pages.
Yup, those who can least afford it are charged the most.
{{The providers of care and big pharma have to be addressed as well as insurance. Doctors are way overpaid and part and parcel the reason why health care costs are so high, of marginal quality, and difficult to get}]
that is so NOT true. The doctors fees are always cut down so they have to see more patients and do more surgeries. There is an imbalance in what they should be paid and what they are paid. On the other hand, the hospital fees are not cut down. The insurance and hospitals have big lobbies and are part of increasing costs.
{{Yet everyone blames the insurance companies, it is an all around scam on both sides.
Why not reform this? Instead of spending billions covering people who could pay for themselves without these exorbitant costs of care?}}
exactly!
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First Posted: 11- 9-09 04:58 PM | Updated: 11- 9-09 08:42 PM