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Hospitals Are Blatantly Ripping Us Off
Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Most Americans are deathly afraid to go to the hospital these days – and it is because of the immense pain that it will cause to their wallets. If you want to get on a path that will lead you to bankruptcy, just start going to the hospital a lot. In America today, hospitals and doctors are blatantly ripping us off and they aren’t making any apologies for it. As you will read about below, some hospitals mark up treatments by 1,000 percent.
In other instances, basic medical supplies are being billed out at hundreds of times what they cost providers. For example, it has been reported that some hospitals are charging up to 30 dollars for a single aspirin pill. It would be difficult to argue that the extreme greed that we see in the medical system is even matched by the crooks on Wall Street. These medical predators get their hands on us when we are at our most vulnerable. They know that in our lowest moments we are willing to pay just about anything to get better or to make the pain go away. And so they very quietly have us sign a bunch of forms without ever telling us how much everything is going to cost. Eventually when the bills come in the mail, it is too late to do anything about it.
How would you feel if someone sold you something for ten times the amount that it was worth?
Would you feel ripped off?
Well, that is what hospitals all over the country are doing every single day. Just check out what one brand new study has discovered…
Some hospitals are marking up treatments by as much as 1,000 percent, a new study finds, and the average U.S. hospital charges uninsured patients three times what Medicare allows.
Twenty of the hospitals in the top 50 when it comes to marking up charges are in Florida, the researchers write in the journal Health Affairs. And three-quarters of them are operated by two Tennessee-based for-profit hospital systems: Community Health Systems and Hospital Corporation of America.
“We just want to raise public awareness of the problem,” said Ge Bai of Washington & Lee University in Virginia, an accounting professor who wrote the study along with Gerard Anderson of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Does reading that make you angry?
It should.
They are greedily taking advantage of all of us.
Other studies have come up with similar results. Here is one example…
According to National Nurses United, U.S. hospital charges continue to soar with a handful of them, such as Meadowlands Hospital Medical Center in Secaucus, N.J., going as far as charging more than ten times the total cost — or almost $1,200 per $100 of the cost of care. Meanwhile, the hundred priciest hospitals in the nation were found to have this cost ratio begin at 765 percent, which is more than twice the national average of 331 percent.
Much of the time, we are being overcharged for tests, services and procedures that we don’t even need.
It has been estimated that the amount of truly wasteful spending in the U.S. medical system comes to a grand total of about $600 billion to $700 billion annually. That means that wasteful medical spending in the U.S. each year is greater than the GDP of the entire country of Sweden.
And of course almost everyone has a story about an absolutely ridiculous medical bill that they have received. In fact, if you have one that you would like to share, please feel free to share it at the end of this article. The following are just a few examples that were shared in an editorial in a local newspaper…
Have you heard about the little girl who required three stitches over her right eye? The emergency room sent her parents a bill for $1,500 — $500 per stitch (NY Times, Dec. 3). My neighbor recently spent six hours in the emergency room with bleeding from the mouth. He was on a blood thinner, needed several blood tests, and his heart was monitored. His hospital bill came to $22,000. A California man diagnosed with lung cancer chose to fight his cancer aggressively. Eleven months later his widow received a bill exceeding $900,000.
One of the most disturbing trends that we are witnessing all over the nation is something called “drive by doctoring”. That is where an extra doctor that isn’t even necessary “pops in” to visit patients that are not his or “assists” with a surgery in order to stick the patient with a big, fat extra bill. The following is from a New York Times article about this disgusting practice…
Before his three-hour neck surgery for herniated disks in December, Peter Drier, 37, signed a pile of consent forms. A bank technology manager who had researched his insurance coverage, Mr. Drier was prepared when the bills started arriving: $56,000 from Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, $4,300 from the anesthesiologist and even $133,000 from his orthopedist, who he knew would accept a fraction of that fee.
He was blindsided, though, by a bill of about $117,000 from an “assistant surgeon,” a Queens-based neurosurgeon whom Mr. Drier did not recall meeting.
How would you like to receive a bill for $117,000 from a doctor that you had never met and that you did not know would be at your surgery?
This is how broken our medical system has become.
And of course this type of abuse is not just happening in New York. It is literally happening all over the nation…
In operating rooms and on hospital wards across the country, physicians and other health providers typically help one another in patient care. But in an increasingly common practice that some medical experts call drive-by doctoring, assistants, consultants and other hospital employees are charging patients or their insurers hefty fees.
They may be called in when the need for them is questionable. And patients usually do not realize they have been involved or are charging until the bill arrives.
If you or a close family member has been to the hospital recently, you probably know how astronomical some of these bills can be.
And if you have a chronic, life threatening disease, you can very rapidly end up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
If you doubt this, just check out the following excerpt from an article that appeared in Time Magazine. One cancer patient out in California ran up nearly a million dollars in hospital bills before he finally died…
By the time Steven D. died at his home in Northern California the following November, he had lived for an additional 11 months. And Alice had collected bills totaling $902,452. The family’s first bill — for $348,000 — which arrived when Steven got home from the Seton Medical Center in Daly City, Calif., was full of all the usual chargemaster profit grabs: $18 each for 88 diabetes-test strips that Amazon sells in boxes of 50 for $27.85; $24 each for 19 niacin pills that are sold in drugstores for about a nickel apiece. There were also four boxes of sterile gauze pads for $77 each. None of that was considered part of what was provided in return for Seton’s facility charge for the intensive-care unit for two days at $13,225 a day, 12 days in the critical unit at $7,315 a day and one day in a standard room (all of which totaled $120,116 over 15 days). There was also $20,886 for CT scans and $24,251 for lab work.
The sad truth is that the U.S. health care system has become all about the money.
A select few are becoming exceedingly wealthy while millions go broke. One very disturbing study discovered that approximately 41 percent of all working age Americans either have medical bill problems or are currently paying off medical debt. And collection agencies seek to collect unpaid medical bills from approximately 30 million Americans every single year.
Once upon a time, going into the medical profession was a sacrifice and you did it because you wanted to help people.
Today, it is considered to be a path to riches.
If the U.S. health care system was a separate country, it would actually be the 6th largest economy on the entire planet. Even though our system is deeply broken, nobody wants to rock the boat because trillions of dollars are at stake. If it was up to me, I would tear the entire thing down and rebuild it from scratch.
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but obamacare will fix that. right? right? huh? right? come on now. you gotta believe...we can...right? right?
just email barack. he'll fix their wagons.
Of course it will, all you have to do is hold out your hand and wait for the government to hand you some drugs to "Forget about it"....
If only those hospitals weren't owned by the states or private corporations padding the pockets of politicians to bring us things like Obamacare....
Get ready to pay $100 a minute for health care services of any kind....
(You best have your co-pay bitches, because the criminal.gov doesn't have a heart.)
Is your Baby choking to death? Here, fill out these forms, and IF your shit is straight, we MIGHT let you in to see a doctor...
Owned by jews, run by jews, operated by jews and endorsed by the most corrupt administration in history.
How exactly is it a surprise hospitals are ripping people off?
Actually a huge number of them are Catholic hospitals. St. this and that hospital.
If you don't like hospitals don't go to them. Start you own medical center. Gather money from your friends (have them skip pot for the day) and build one yourself. I'm positive that medical treatment will then be virtually free at your facility.
good idea....he and his friends will not be allowed to open a hospital. As a matter of fact, they couldn't even open a clinic to treat athlete's foot. AMA influence in Washington shut that down a LONG time ago.
I have a better idea....allow insurance companies to tell hospitals what they can/can't do. Oh wait, the AMA shut down that avenue too.
THe problem in health care are all the artificial constraints created by the government at the hands of AMA lobbyists. Remove the constraints...solve the problem.
I agree. Get the government completely out of it and free markets in. Problem solved.
Blaming the JOOOOOOSSS, as Richard Chesler does, is not the answer or the issue.
Certificate of Need laws in most states make it very difficult to open new hospitals.
You Amerkans are so fucked. Here's an idea, get your ass on a plane. Find the appropriate facility in Asia or Europe, pay cash, have a nice vacation and fly back home. If everyone did that, your medical system would either change or collapse.
Remember, Hank Paulson claims to be a Mormon. Pestilence, disease, evil, cancer, and greed cross religious lines.
It's human [banker] nature.
I think, not a Mormon, but a Christian Scientist. Which is even more amazing to me, because I have known a number of Christian Scientists, and every one I knew was a straight arrow, wouldn't ever steal a penny. (I have also known a few Mormons, and they were all also straight arrows.)
what about a mormon convert like harry reid lol
Paulson is TRIBE (zion)
suck it Thisson
Where is Tarabel and her World Jewish Congress/Protocols of Zion comment numbering system lol.
how exactly did this conversation drift off into the finer points of religious bigotry?
You must be new here
No comment section is complete without a wealth of jew or zion related obscenities, and a sprinkling of jabs against other cultures and religions.
Yes Sol, they will. Kindly wait your turn.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOV8mBjHHYg
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I have an ouchie
Myself and everyone else I know has been screwed by the the system.
If you don't make phone calls and dispute the bill then it's on you.
I really agree that you have to dispute each medical bill. The difficulty is finding out what a "fair price" for a treatment is. A great resource for this is CMS.gov which lists the price Medicare will pay for a service. The Medicare Cost is a pretty good approximation of the "actual cost" to the hospital and can be used as the rock bottom price. (Most private insurance companies will agree to pay ~30% over the Medicare cost.) It is a pain in the butt to work through the billing codes and find the price though. A brief tutorial on how to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uNGCZikr3A
When negotiating with the hospital you need to know the Medicare cost. This is equivalent to knowing the dealer invoice price when negotiating a car purchase.
So what are you going to do if the hospital overcharges you? Fight them? It's very hard to do as an individual.
In my experience, it's better not going to a hospital-employed doctor and stay away from ANY hopsital if at all possible. Try choosing a docotr who is in his own group or association with other doctors. They tend to be much more reasonable since their butts are on the line and most of them really want to do a good job and build a solid reputation
Snyder has got nothing on Karl "The Ego" Von Denninger when it comes to ripping on healthcare and its blatant Sherman act and other violations of fair trade. NO ONE, NO ONE without putting something into the kitty should have as much as a hangnail snipped off, no free riders..
"So what are you going to do if the hospital overcharges you? Fight them? It's very hard to do as an individual."
Smply not paying worked for me. Not that I enjoyed having to do that. But when a slip on some ice while walking across a damn parking lot suddenly results in a broken leg, and surgery is required for it to heal correctly, and you don't have the $12,000 to pay (with the many, many $10 pairs of disposable gloves, $5 screws, etc, being used), then what choice does one have?
This problem has been growing for decades but all the politicians were bought and so nothing got done.
Thanks to sky-high medical care thievery and insane prescription drug costs (US with 4% of the world's population accounts for 50% of world spending on drugs), US debt and unfunded liabilities are at least $1,400,000 per taxpayer and rising at $70,000 per taxpayer per year.
Kotlikoff has debt and unfunded liabilities at $2,000,000 per US taxpayer. In contrast, debt per taxpayer is $64,000 in Greece.
Keep buying those 30 year US bonds.
Hey, the price of those 30Y bonds will go higher when the Fed flicks a switch and buys 5 or 10 trillion worth. But all them dollahs ain't going to buy the same amount of goods and services as today!
lol,, and its not just hospitals.
I'd like a breakdown of tribe doctor vs non tribe doctor.......
My mother had worked for a Fortune 500 company and retired before they started slashing benefits. She had a pretty good health care policy but still felt compelled to take out a supplemental policy.
She had a good but short active retirement before she got ill and ended up with failing pulmonary function and on Oxygen. The supplemental policy she had turned out to be pretty useless - paying almost nothign for home health aids.
Admitted to the hospital - with clear instructions limiting measures to be taken - her life was PROLONGED against her wishes BECAUSE she had a good policy from her employer. She ended up on a respirator - despite CLEAR INSTRUCTIONS AGAINST such a move and took weeks longer to die than she should have.
Of course that's not as common these days because few retirees have good health care policies these days.
note to self..........add doctors to list of people to be guillotined...........the French called the guillotine "Madame Guillotine" or "The National Razor".........
Six blades give a closer shave.
Sorry. That makes me angry.
Reminds me of the movie "Million Dollar Baby".
Hookers are ripping me off too.
Hookers provide a service. Hospitals when they are not killing you, they are bankrupting you. But they are best at doing both to you:
The most stunning statistic, however, is that the total number of deaths caused by conventional medicine is an astounding 783,936 per year. It is now evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the US. (By contrast, the number of deaths attributable to heart disease in 2001 was 699,697, while the number of deaths attributable to cancer was 553,251.5)
http://www.webdc.com/pdfs/deathbymedicine.pdf
Yep. A neighbor pulled some muscles while building. He made the mistake of going to the sick factory's ER first. Caught something while there and had to be admitted back into the sick factory a few days later. Avoid them like the plague that they are!
20 are in Florida. Where old people live, scared old people who either refuse to admit they're dying or can count on having at least one emotionally retarded daughter who refuses to admit Mommy and Daddy are dying and insists the doctors do "whatever it takes" to buy Mommy and Daddy a few more weeks or days or hours of life.
The doctors know better, of course, but the Americans have families too, and the hospital gets pissed if you suggest that Mom should go home and die in peace in her own bed while the family still has anything if value they can sell or pawn. The Third World doctors are only interested in making the money needed to send for their extended families in the old country, and move them into your childhood home.
As I keep saying---if Obamacare had teally involved "deatn panels" that decided who was worth trying to save, it might actually have done some good. As it is, there's a reason dogs and cats get better and cheaper health care than humans. When it's time for Mittens to go, nobody thinks worse of you if you put the old fleabag down. The kids get over it.
And the hospitals themselves get ripped off by local government. In Connecticut Gov. Molloy's state’s hospitals complaining that the new budget will hike taxes on non-profits by $350 million while cutting Medicaid reimbursements to effectively trim their revenues.
Malloy is proof that voting is rigged
that tool of course just endorsed hitlery as well
Now see, if we just had "universal healthcare" where everyone paid their "fair share" into the kitty of .gov (except for the third of Americans who are unemployed/under-employed or on "assistance" who will get a subsidy) instead of this "government mandated catastrophe" and CEO enrichment scheme called ObamaCare...
...wait a minute, that was .gov ;-)
Here's a radical alternative: Leave the country, renounce your citizenship, walk back into the US at the Mexican 'border,' say "No habla ingles. ASYLUM." You'll then be a true 1st Class 'citizen' showered with free benefits, and near-zero accountability for criminal acts - if that's your thing. Problem solved!
Good idea. But why come back to this Nazi-junta-shit-country called USSA? Why not leave it for good?
If anyone knows a CNA, housekeeper, foodstaff, inventory specialist, transporter, transcriptionist, even a nurse or PA, one will have a huge problem with this quote from an otherwise good article.
The people who ACTUALLY DO THE WORK are NOT getting rich from this.
My own family has CNA's, nurses, and I have a friend who is a PA, and none of them are on the path to riches, unless being in debt to student loans, and mortgage payments is the new rich.
My sister in law makes $95k a year billing people for seeing a doctor when they really see a nurse. She's also a drunk nobody should trust, ever.
A son of one of my mom's friends is making $400k a year as an anesthesiologist. He doesn't actually inject anyone. He justs figures out how much to give them.
Pharmacists are making $100k+ a year taking pills from a box and putting them in a bottle.
People that are doing work that takes 100 times the skill and 100 times the labor for almost nothing. Something has to change.
This. Friend of mine is a GP. Or at least was. Got sick of the whole mess, dealing with insurers and paperwork more than patients. Now, she works in public health for the state and is happy as a clam and doesn't have to worry about how the bills are going to get paid because insurers often don't pay up for months and months.
lol. so hospitals are insanely profitable then?
- liability insurance and lawsuits
- defensive medicine precisely because of that potential liability
- medicare and medicaid reimbursements that don't cover the costs
- legions of administrators and clerks to deal with insurance and compliance
- by law emergency rooms must treat all comers regardless of whether they can pay (and this is massively abused by those w/o insurance)
fyi, about 50% of the hospitals in the US are non-profit and another 15-20% are owned by the state/local govt. not saying there isn't overcharging going on, but you act like they're printing money by not marking up aspirin like Walmart.
Ha, you fell for the bullshit.
Hospitals are building $200 million complexes all over the place. Waiting rooms have fountains, LCD televisions everywhere. Grand entrances and marble walls.
Modern hospitals look like you are walking into a Vegas hotel. Just like them you'll be walking out broke when you leave.
Don't forget getting baseball stadiums named after them. Must have come out of petty cash.
http://providenceparkpdx.com/
Non-profit does not mean that you cannot pay Board members, CEO, Administrative Staff, and Contractors enormous amounts of money. It only means that you don't pay dividends to stockholders.
If my memory serves, the last time I spent the night in a hospital, they charged me $10.00 for an aspirin, and they also charged me for a toothbrush I did not ask for, and which I thought they told me they were giving me.
That was a bargain. They charge $5 for the stupid paper cup the aspirin comes in.
If the US sheeple don't get it, the rest of the world surely does. A typical european private health insurance package, even the most expensive one, will give you cover on the whole planet but not in the USSA. And there is no reason to assume that hospitals in the USSA on average are by any means better then those in Switzerland, Japan or Germany.
Seen from outside, the US just looks like a gigantic extortion scheme for the benefit of the 0.1%, in essence not different from what the Ukrainans have to endure. The rotten-to-the-core health care system of the USSA is but one aspect of its inherent Ukrainism with its fourth-world living standards.
1) Make hospitals non profit.....
2) Make all employees (management types are employees) are in same pension plan with same rate of contribution.
3)Make all Management positions equal to twice the average nurse's annual base pay. The position is for those who care.
4) Get a set of Best Practices that are no more than one page for each department.
ie....be clean....respect the patient....do your best to give proper treatment options....follow the protocols for treatment outlined by staff....
When another regulation has to be entered, one has to be eliminated.
5) What the hell is with pharmacy costs? An epi-pen that really SAVES LIVES COSTS 250-300 DOLLARS. THE PRACTICE DUMMY IS 8 BUCKS?
6 ) Eliminate all insurance. We all pay as we go. Costs will plummet......so will care....
7) NO CARE FOR SMOKERS. THEY ARE TRYING TO KILL THEMSELVESS ALREADY.
8)No more cancer treatments, heart bypasses, stents...organ replacements....damn things are too expensive and not worth the money.
I would limit insurance to just catastrophic coverage. Let people pay for their own day to day health care. I'd also object to eliminating cancer treatments and heart bypasses. In terms of effectiveness, heart bypass surgery has come a long, long way and is one of the more effective treatments around now. Plus, recuperation time has been drastically slashed. Same with cancer care. A lot of cancer care is now being done either pharmaceutically or through low or non-invasive procedures that, many times, require no more than a day or two of hospitalization. Procedures like cryo-ablation and RF-ablation are doing wonders with smaller, locaized tumors.
NO CARE FOR SMOKERS. THEY ARE TRYING TO KILL THEMSELVESS ALREADY.................no care for assholes who chug coke/pepsi either.........where should we draw the line???
You're doin fine, keep goin
How about changing your name from "docinthehouse" to "DickontheHedge"!
I just had my yearly health checkup. The doctor noticed a chunk of earwax in one of my ears and asked me if I wanted it removed. I politely declined because the last time my doctor took out a chunk of earwax, the insurance company would not pay for it, it was coded as surgery. That one chunk of earwax that took all of 30 seconds to remove cost me $125.00!
I am 60 years old. I was born in a regular hospital in LaCrosse, Wisconsin in 1955. Back then, most people paid for their medical bills out of pocket. My birth cost $40.
The reason the system we have has spiraled out of control is that whatever a birth costs today - $10,000, $20,000, who knows? - like the cost of all procedures, is invisible to people who are insured, and everyone in a position to effect change is insured. So they just don't care enough to change it.
The average birth cost today for a simple, uncomplicated birth is $40,000 in the land of the fee.
I have actually heard of couples that wait to marry until after the child/children are born, specifically because the govt pretty much pays the whole tab prenatal-through-postnatal for single mothers. LOL.
As to the ast story regarding Seton Medical Center, that's a very standard practice there. For quite some time, Seton was experiencing deep financial problems. It was the only hospital from the borders of San Francisco down to Burlingame, a distance of about 20 miles, and served an increasingly poorer population, many of whom had only Medicare or Medi-Cal, if they had insurance at all. As such, when reimbursement rates for those two programs were getting progressively squeezed in order to reduce budgets, Seton was quite adversely impacted. It has reached the point where they put themselves up for sale. A buyer was located, but that buyer wouldn't commit to keeping the facility open for a minimum of five years and also said nothing about keeping a satellite clinic on the San Mateo County coast open. So, Kamala Harris, California's Attorney General (who has to approve the sale of all hospitals), declined to approve and Seton is back in the same mess.
So what Seton, and I assume many other hospitals in similar situations do, is soak those patients that have decent insurance. They'll severely overcharge them and then "accept" a reduced amount from the insurance company and maybe, if they're lucky, the patient will pay a bill that the insurance company has already paid.
It's a shame because Seton was once a very highly regarded hospital. My father had one of the first quadruple or quintuple bypass operations (can't remember the exact number) back in the infancy of that procedure and I recall many people telling him he was fortunate to be having it at Seton. How the mighty have fallen. I wouldn't trust them to treat a shaving nick at this point.
We are paying for those that like sitting on their ass and watching Jerry all day
Western medicine is one of the leading causes of death in Amerika. Avoid it.
So stop paying it! Waaa-waaaah.
It's all about the debt that can be generated.
Eat clean. Don't be a junkie/alcoholic. Stay away from vaccines and flu shots. Kick the cigs. You'll likely be able to avoid these people for quite awhile.
I'd sure want them around for a laceration or some other type of injury trauma. Other than that, Christ no.
Good article.
It is impossible to articulate the layers upon layers of corruption, collusion, and greed.
It is Chaos.
Hey! It's every doctor and nurses right to have a beach house mansion on all four corners of the country. Deal with it!
You mean the hospital administrators and the corporate guys and the large shareholders living off the dividends, and yeah a small percentage of docs.
My wife is a RN, holds a BS in nursing (because the hospital pretty well forced it on her), believe me we are far from an average suburban home than alone a mansion. Pay sucks, hours suck, benefits suck, new liabilities and responsibilities heaped on her constantly. This is even after leaving the hosptital for a sucessful orthopedic surgeon practice. Don't lump the peons in with the doctors and admins, your average nurse is struggling to make ends meet the same as any working stiff.
They may be marking up treatments by as much as 1,000%. However, the average profit margin for a hospital is less than 5% (currently 4%) and their total executive compensation is usually less than 1% of revenue (UPMC is .9%). The real question is: Why do they have to charge so much to be profitable?
Don't keep us all in suspense genius.
How come Hollywood blockbusters never get into the black?
I have a solution but it's only for those with the balls to use it:
https://creditboards.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=324812&page=1
What you appear to be proposing via the forum link doesn't take balls . . . . it takes cash (to pay the "allowable amount" of a medical bill), which a lot of people just don't have these days.
That's why you need one of these two:
Plan A: a REALLY good health insurance plan, or
Plan B: a Passport and a vetted place abroad, for Elective Surgery.
In the absence of either, you'd better not have a 401k, IRA, or Home Equity, or you'll have to use these first before you get Government help. Gov help is only for those who can't pay taxes, you naive old-school fool.
My daughter went into labor in the early afternoon, gave birth late afternoon, spent the night, went home late the next day. Normal delivery, no complications other than the doctor was too busy to attend her, so she was asked to hold back and not push for delivery. After 5 hours of being told to hold back she told the nurse to "fuck off" "I am going to give birth now!" So the nurse ran to the doctor who managed to look in for a minute or two to check things were normal. He was busy with another emergency, complication on another woman. He did get back again when the baby was coming.
She then spent the night and next day till evening. Went home with healthy baby. They have no insurance due to Husband losing his job that had health insurance and getting a new job without insurance. They can't get Obama care because Wisconsin has no health exchange. Simply put, the entire bill was mailed to them.
It was unreadable, with hundreds of line items. Doctors fees showed NO DISCOUNT for his near total lack of attendance. All fees added up to just over $20,000. That was for just short of a day and a half in care, one night.
The hospital was threatening collection inside one month, asking for a $2,500 a month minimum payment to avoid collection. Luckily they were able to refinance their home using some built up equity and paid the hospital off before collection.
Raise you hand if you think she really ran up 20+ thousand in services.
Just for comparison, I had my first while still in college back in 1986. No insurance and the hospital bill was $2,000 or what a year of tuition, room and board were at my state university. Now a year there will cost about $22k, so college and HC costs have gone up lock step it seems. 10 or 11 times the cost over a span of just under 30 years. Professional wages maybe have gone up 2 times in that period, if you can find a professional job.
Excellent comparison. That does make perfect sense. The two greatest inflations Health Care and Education!
Next is food and every nondiscretionary item you need to buy. And don't forget the new taxes!
Let them sue you.
In discovery you ask them for the original quote and posted pricing.....
Oh Oops, there wasn't an original quote and and there is no posted pricing?
Immediate violation of the Sherman, Clayton and Robinson-Patman acts. Boom, get the cuffs for Mr. Hospital administrator....which is why they will ALWAYS settle for 1/10 the price.
Because in court they will lose, if more people would just take them to court.
Squid
http://www.rjmintz.com/misc/asset-protection-articles/newsletter-article...
I gave birth to both my daughters in Thailand--the first hospital on the tropical island of Koh Samui was advertising birth packages (in English) to westerners. It was a small private hospital that had huge private rooms with balconies. The Thai nurses all wore these sexy nurse white Halloween outfits with the hat and all. The whole place had this vibe like someplace movie stars would go for drug rehab, not a hospital at all.
My main OB/GYN was a graduate of Johns Hopkins who had lived in America for 20 years before deciding to return to his native Thailand. He was trying to turn the hospital away from plastic surgery and towards a fertility and birthing clinic, but the place was small, he said only averaging two births a week. We got treated like movie stars because we were both westerners (me and baby daddy, I mean) he said he never had that. It was usually rich Thais or western men with Thai wives/girlfriends.
A few miscomunications with staff but no major issues. The baby was two weeks late, they induced labor, she got caught in the birth canal, emergency C-section. Not my perfect birth moment but I don't blame the hospital I was screaming for them to knock me out when the back labor hit. Six doctors were in the room and four nurses that I remember. I got stitched up by their main plastic surgeon, who was very proud of his work. "Six month you wear bikini and nobody ever know!" he marvelled.
So after this whole debacle of five days in the hospital (private room large bathroom and balcony), emergency c-section after labor induction, some bilirubin jaundice treatment for the baby, first shot etc? All included in the package price (they apologized for changing us from package vaginal birth to package c-section) of 39,000 baht...came out to about $1200 US.
That was 2006, and there has been some inflation, mostly because they figured out they can charge Americans for anything and we'll still say it's cheap...
Fixed that for you.
This preditory 'capitalist' system that's going in Amerika works well for some.
1. Dumb down the peons through an over priced, low rated education system tied to enormous amounts of debt that they will be bound to for life.
2. Ensure that they are as unhealthy as possible through corrupting the available food industry - ala Monsanto, hyper calorie fast food, etc.
3. Hide the over charging of SICK CARE providers behind the veil of 'Healh Care Insurance' and accept crazy charges for Medicare by pharmaceutical peddlers. Most with corporate coverage (more and more a rarity) have zero idea what USSA Sick Care charges today.
4. Prevent any and all competition in the SICK CARE industry by protecting cartel behaviour - e.g. Certificate of Need (aptly CON) requirements, creating insurmountable entry barriers for fresh competing providers. Starve funding for and legislate against any charity providers, thus duping peons and forcing them into cartel service.
5. Put an airtight credit monlitoring system in place to control the debt serfs, and make bankruptcy expensive. Yes, so-called 'medical' bills can be negotiated downwards or discharged through bankruptcy, a painful, lengthy process after which the peon will still have paid a mutlple of what that 'medical' care was worth.
THAT is Amerika's 'Health Care System', which costs 10X what it does in other developed countries because we are 'consumers of health care' unlike human citizens who sometimes become ill.
And now we are coerced into paying for it at penalty of fine.
Yes, this SHOULD make you angry, I sure am pissed.
One of the oral chemotherapy drugs I am getting for cancer has a price of $10,500 for 21 15mg capsules. No one can tell me that the manufacturer couldn't provide those same capsules for 10% of that cost and still make a huge profit. The drug is a simple analog of a drug that has been around since the 1950's so the argument of them having to charge 10 grand to recoup their R&D cost doesn't pass the smell test at all . . . .
I'm sure that my case is the norm for the cancer treatment business. It's all about the money. That's why the half dozen or more CURES for cancer that you can find on the US Patent site have never seen the light of day in a clinical setting. Every one of those treatments uses drugs and other treatments that are already in the public domain so the pharmaceutical cartel can't make a killing on them. Because of this no-one will pay the cost to send them through the FDA approval process. The end result is people die needlessly.
It's a proven fact that drug companies spend more money on marketing and advertizement than they do on research. They often piggy back on to university research departments and pay a small fee to get their work and then patent it. The University being public funded in part. The patent system has loopholes to extend patents beyond legal norms It's a giant rip off machine. But Americans will tell you it is the best system in the world. Well, if you've never been anywhere, then yes, you might think that. I know better, I've been treated in other systems and been friends with health care workers in British, Australian and Swedish medical services. USA is not number #1, except in fees
A close personal friend's daughter has had childhood cancer at age 3 and again at 12. All the top flight treatments and surgery and extended hospital stays have been well handled by the health care providers, hospitals and clinics. During hospital stays the family was forced to pay travel to the special care hospital in Malmö, 3 hours drive away. That was the only cost, all else was unbilled. The health insurance system paid and a typical cancer treatment and hospital stay can be billed to national health on one page of a form. My friend is director of IT for a regional Swedish Hospital System. There are just a handful of billers who track the treatments done, so the system knows what is being done. No bills, no insurance claims, nothing. It is real health care, not rip off theft.
Get on a plane and come to Singapore. Fuck, for one capsul that's first class in both directions.
Get on the get net, email an oncologist at Mount E or Gelneagals and get the price.
You're NUTS to pay that.
You could also go to japan. Same deal except its a bit hard to get pricing since you need to be able to read Japanese.
Squid
A friend went to St Luke's at Makati Medical Center, in the Philippines, world class hospital, for a bypass, Cost P1,200,000 or $26,000.
Stayed there for 12 days at the hospital, private room great service and every doctor nurse and consultant was totally open with him.
Went down to a resort afterwards, talked to a developer building around 250 sq mtr houses on the next lot,
All with swimming pools fully fitted out and a good sizes plot.
$74,300 for fifty year lease with an option to extend for another 20 years at a fixed price of 10% or $7,300 AT THE END of the fifty year.
6% or $4,400 a year for whats called juice, the maintenance contract, and its gated.
Bought one there and then, said he got free and change over, because there is no fucking way he could have got the operation in US at the all in cost of less than $110,000 including flights hotels resort meals and every fucking expenses including medications and coffee at airport lounge.
Spends 6 month a year now and rents it it to his friends the rest of the year.
I'm also going there to get one.
Fuck the US
Fuck that, get some cannabis oil. You'll feel better as you are cured as a side effect.
Last two times I used a hospital, for my kids, I presented no insurance info.
I waited until the "nasty notes" came, then went in to the hospital and negotiated for the Medicare rate, paid, and left. An "affiliated" doctor refused to negotiate, and he got nothing.
Last baby was C-section. Negotiated with the doctor and hospital before hand, and got Medicare rates. Paid in advance. Good to go.
Liberty is a demand. Tyranny is submission..
Hence the reason I don't drink or do drugs and I eat clean food I prepare myself, I control me. Personal responsibility. Of course there are ailments that are uncontrollable, life happens but if I can live a somewhat clean life I can hopfully prevent as many self administered ailments as I can and stay away from big pharma and the medical scam.
Life is a buzz I don't need a substance to remind me of that.
I am adding my own testimony to this criminal indictment of US medical system: ER: $5000 bill for ten pills that retail $6 flat.
These days hospitals resemble drug joints where rich can get high. If you got dough you go to ER, say you have a headache or other lie and they will cheerfully give you morphine and all other schedule II drugs and hold you under observation or sent you home with huge bill. That's the fact. And that's why they are there.
The below I quote my comment from few weeks ago about doctors and medical system.
Do not get me started about doctors.
In few words, in US and unfortunately in some other countries, physicians’ true professional objective and purpose of education, even if they deny it, is to seriously to moderately injure their heavily insured patients to the degree that would still allow them to cover exuberant fees and enormous drug costs, through private insurance or government or desperate family selling all they got. Dying poor are left in pain to die, thrown out on the street pavements like dogs according to doctors Hypocritical not Hippocratic oath as it was well documented in LA Skid Row few years ago.
Additionally these parasitic doctors lie to their rich patients about diagnosis, making it potentially worse, just to make experiments on humans to patent the procedure or push another useless drug. Those heavily insured patients are purposefully misdiagnosed with certain diseases such as cancer and offer surgical removal of whole organs, breasts, uterus, ovaries etc., just to make money. Even worn out Hollywood starlets undergo televised self mutilation for commercial propaganda purposes to insidiously entice millions of potential victims of medical crimes to be maimed or disfigured without any shred of evidence of any disease. The transplantation industry is even worse, dealing with body parts obtained through mutilation or murder of poor and abandoned children of the streets or prisoners all over the world.
Unnecessary, painful testing which amounts to torture, highly addictive drug regiments are common examples of abuse of young and elderly unaware of the purpose of the procedures and often done against published research results condemning such tests, therapies or drugs as extremely harmful.
It’s that simple. Most doctors want you to be sick so he/she could suck up blood from you and your family. And after you dead they want your body and sold for profit.
Cheap preventive medicine, with 95% success rate of early intervention is practically abandoned since there is no money in it. Entire commercial food industry and tobacco conspire with medical establishment, hospitals and insurance companies to destroy health of a nation. To make you sick. Such act would amount to treason during cold war years.
Few doctors who focus of homeostatic physiological balance of human organism and developed successful therapies which restore the balance no matter what disease they are dealing with are persecuted, threaten with jail and revoking medical license.
However, this deceitful practice that doctors are engaged, playing on people fear of pain, suffering and death by giving them false hope is not new.
Philosophers Kant and Voltaire in XVIII century being of very fragile health as children vow to stay away from doctors of their time and cured themselves using their own remedies in many occasions of serious diseases and live over 80, a quarter century longer then average people lifespan back then. What did they know?
We have to demand preventive medicine all the way. The best cure is prevention. First of all we should demand that we consume real food and not the poisonous shit that is being sold in supermarkets, we should insist to break up vertically integrated food cartels that aim to continuously make us sick. But there is more that needs to be changed, namely brutal system of legal slavery and exploitation run by oligarchs since it is number one source of oppression and physically devastating stress that is killing us.
Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore is S$95 for a walk in visit in the Emergency room.
That's US$60.
Go see a GP at a neighbourhood clinic, S$30 including the prescription as most clinics have a dispensery attached.
That's 20 US$ to see a doctor and get the medicine...usually some antibiotic or what have you. Let that sink in folks.
Its fucked up in Canada too....if you're not resident there. Brought the grand kids to see mom and dad back in 2004, one of my twins picked up something on the flight, went to the North East health centre in Edmonton at 0645 in the morning. They were all sitting around drinking coffee, doing nohting. Walked in, they asked for a provincial health care card, said don't live in Canada.
Oh, well then its......get this, 2004 mind you,,,,
C$450 per kid.
Fuck. You.
Went to a medicentre for C$100.
I just stared at that skank.
You want to come to get medical work done in Singapore, get on the Internet and get pricing, its all posted.
Why?
BECAUSE ITS THE LAW. It might surprise all of you to know that its also the law in the go old USA......but its also the law that to qualify to be president both of your parents have to be American and look WHAT is in the white house.
Alas, watching the decline from afar doesn't make it any prettier.
Squid
Friend of mine was visiting New Zealand and had to go to the Emergengy Room while there.
Non Resident, just on holiday.
Charge... $0
Got to agree with that "aged starlets" one. I couldn't believe nobody called bullshit when Jolie had her tits gouged out "prophylactically". What a fucking moron.
There were 3 cases of knob cancer last year. We'd better all get our dicks lopped off, just in case.
Jesus. A fucking role model for women. What hope is there?
My doctor mentioned thyroid to me, something about if I was tested for it or whatever. There wasn't anyone in the room. Ever since I've been swamped with thyroid medicine ads. I have no proof but I think my doctor targeted me.
You're now enjoying one of the many joys and benefits of the new electronic medical record system.
Do some research before you start on any of that shit. Allopathic thyroid "treatment" is a farce. Buyer beware.
I am a urologist. If I do a circumcision in the operating room on some Medicaid kid in my state, after overhead and taxes, i get thirty eight dollars for my take home pay. Hospital charges about 20K for my time there with the patient. Welcome to corporate, hospital-chain medicine!
Who's turning his head and coughing now?
Wow, so YOU are the one who's really getting "skinned alive"! Sorry, couldn't help myself.
You should be shunned for such barbarism, not be getting paid for it.
Yeah, the hospital are crooked apes too.
No sympathy. Well, less than I might have, we've all been fucked by the system. But you guys drank the kool aid of the insurance boys, and became employees, and now you're paying the price. 30 years ago 85% of MD's were self employed. Now it's 15%. From memory; figures are likely wrong but the message is the same.
If a few more of you spoke out against drug- and insurance company- run medicine, you might get some credibility back. But when any thinking observer can see you just do what you're told, you're part of the problem. Try looking at the (lack of) evidence behind statins, or the cholesterol-heart disease hypothesis, for example. Or look at the link between SIDS and infant vaccination. Don't just chug that fucking kool aid. You know where that leads.
Is this a Great Country, or what?
All sorts of folks Living The American Dream.
What's on TV?
p.s. What was it again that philosopher Carlin said about the American Dream?
If I get cancer, I'll divorce my wife immediately and sign all my assets over to her. If I survive, we won't remarry until I've cleared all my debts in bankruptcy court. If I'm going down, I have a moral obligation not to drag my family down with me.
Might want research these two words that will be thrown at you and your wife by your creditors and their lawyers: fraudulent conveyance.
Working in ICU for so many years I could tell you some stories.
But, it seems everyone seems to think they can live forever and allow us to do some very difficult things in spite of the prognosis.
There are many reasons for the cost, certainly if I had a choice I would not persue any high cost risky treatment
I would rather go home to my maker.
But you know, when you have crushing pain or can't breath, well you go to the ER inspite of all your big talk.
I have taken care of a lot of people who did all the right things too, stuff happens
It would be real stupid not to have insurance
I don't like the system either.
Less is better.
Americans want everything, so theres one of your reasons for the high costs.
So it's "Americans" fault that the Sickcare System rapes, pillages, and plunders with impunity, not the people who gave it to us. God you are fucking obtuse and.off the mark. I suppose it had nothing to do with the drug cartel, AMA, FDA, govt largess, all the way down to hospital administrators and even the buttwipers who administer the daily poisons.
not saying they are not part of the problem
obtuse to you is some one who tries to explain more clearly the problem beyound your catch words
We keep people alive way beyound their bodies abilities which is very expensive
So yes, part of the expense is consumer driven
It is passed on to the rest of us because many of those folks have no money
But the hospitial does it because they are afraid of being sued
Big money sueing medical folks you know, huge liability insurance premiums etc.
What's a matter, you can't handle the truth?
Typical ZH bitching
big mouths, little understanding, no solutions.
The alternative to awful US healthcare costs is to go South. Panama, Costa Rica, Ecuador - - all offer better healthcare and significantly lower cost.
The cost for medical procedures is significantly less in these countries even after including the costs of airfares, hotels, and local meals.
ObamaCare has taken US healthcare from awful to totally unacceptable.
But, you have choices, and they are really good choices at that.
yes that is a good alternative
I have done it myself
but it is not without it's risks
not everyone can do that
it is not an easy situation
It is true the people who do the work are not the ones making the money. You do have to look at how hospitals are now affiliating themselves with insurers. There are two classes of hospitals in the US, the rich ones and the poor ones, so they don't all rip off but it is out of control all over. Now take a look if you happen to be the wife a banker who gets a bill for $75k for a hammer toe procedure. This even pissed off the rich bankers. You had a doctor of the celebrities billing United and by accident, they sent the bill to the insured...no problem for United to kick this kind of money out if you are in the banking business.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2014/03/17509880-to-fix-hammer-toe-billed-by.html
Niw let's take a look at what Mayo is doing with United Healthcare. They want to take over all the revenue cycling in all hospitals in the US and funny thing is that Optum 360 is a partner with Dignity Health, another healthcare hospital system, who's in there for the money. Dignity has had their own income issues to include employee pension fund shortages. None other than United wanting to be the outsourcing company for every hospital contract they can get. If you read the job boards on people hired by Optum 360 they all talk about how bad the benefits are as many are fired from the hospital and then rehired under Optum 360 to basically keep doing the same job, maybe different software, of course provided by another division of United. They do that. Your bills will not go down with this as they are "profit centers".
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2015/04/mayo-clinic-is-latest-to-outsource.html
And then we have the Optum/United Healthcare urgent care clinics who of course want to take over that area as well, raised 36 million from secret investors and bought a chain of Urgent Care centers.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2015/05/optum-clinics-holdings-new-subsidiary.html
All your medical records also go to Optum Labs where drug and device companies pay Optum for the ability to do research on medical records...so you pay for that too with prescriptions, the money big pharma pays Optum to research and see how their devices and drugs might be doing. By the way the FDA offers this for free in their data base, called the Sentinel program.
McLaren is another chain of "poor" hospitals that also went into business with United Healthcare so they could stay open and they are in the Optum Labs group.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2014/03/mclaren-hospital-system-announces-lay.html
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2014/05/boston-scientific-joins-optum-united.html
this has to be a result of f ed up 0bamao care, that and the hospitals have to make up for the free care the illegal invader parasites get for there third world diseases.
I had an accident on the farm recently that required a visit to my local ER. Long story short, I went to pay the bill as I was checking out and was offered an 10% discount for paying the 'current' bill in full before I leave. Problem was, after the dust settled and a few drive-by-doctor bills came floating in, the hospital piled on even more charges so much so as to dwarf the original bill. I went back because you used to have 30 days to still take advantage of the 10% discount. The woman in billing told me that because of Obamadon'tcare, they did away with the 30 day grace period. We went back and forth about it until finally she said, " Mr. Master, if you don't pay this bill, we'll have no choice but to turn it over to a collection agency and that could ruin your credit score."
I started laughing uncontrolably and said as I left, "You go right ahead and do that honey, I'm debt free and have no need for a credit score."
Insurance is prohibitively expensive, so I will just visit the ER when I need a doctor and ignore the bills. Fuck em all and feed em starfish.
Hostpitals should advertise their prices in advance - not after the treatment