Is that his out of pocket expense of what the hospital billed insurance?
Because my hospital billed insurance $15,000 and all I got was 1 bag of saline.
He must know some important people to get such a discount.
I paid 1200 USD a month for a family of 3 for my health insurance to have the privilege of paying more a hospital bill.
I had to go to the ER because I slit my pinky on some glass and waited in the ER for 5 hours. They had to rip then dried blood and paper towel that was stuck on my finger because it took so long.
After all that, I had to pay 3000usd of my own money which didn’t cover my minimum. Why DA FUCK DO I EVEN NEED INSURANCE!?!?!?
The fucking nurse on staff that came to help me for a few minutes was not within my network. Ya fuck that hospital too.
Do you have Urgent Care near you? They could have done some stitches.
I’d probably just super glue the wound closed myself.
I uh…don’t think that’s sanitary.
Super glue spray was used in the Vietnam War to close wounds on the battlefield.
And it’s sometimes in first aid kits at places where slicing wounds can be common, like barbershops.
Still shouldn’t use random superglue from the arts+crafts section, though. Sterility aside there’s different types of cyanoacrylate. I don’t think any are actually toxic but some are definitely less (as in zero) irritating to tissue.
It was Sunday and all Urgent care is not 24 hours in my area. I actually waited so long in the ER that one of the Urgent Cares opened, but at that point I was already inside and triaged. If I knew I would wait inside for another 2 hours, I would have left.
For whoever doesn’t know. Unless you are going to die within the next 6 hours. Go to urgent care.
Not gonna say the system ain’t broken but that’s what the system wants you to do.
My insurance is $75 to go to Urgent Care. Maximum payout.
ER means $3000 minimum just to go in the door.
Urgent Care can handle stitches, and if you need to go to the ER they can make that determination.
My wife has to go to the ER and we went to a hospital that was in network. The hospital is indeed in network but the fucking ER is a separate entity and was not. I guess we should have been better informed consumers. /s
ER was in-network. The nurse and doctor was also in-network. The second nurse, who connected me to the ECG, and the person who read the ECG was not in-network. No way of knowing at the time. Balance billing was permitted in that state at that time, which out-of-network provider used to the full extent.
I’m still salty about that.
That is seriously fucked up.
For me, I called my insurance on the phone while bleeding profusely and wanted to make sure I went to the right hospital. I still got hit with out of network bills.
Yeah but in the UK they have to wait 2 weeks to see a specialist
If I tried to go see my primary care doctor right now in the US, I’d probably have to wait at least 3 months for an appointment.
We have waits for specialists too. To get my vasectomy, I had to wait six weeks from my referral to my first consult, then another month from the consult to the actual surgery.
And then I got a bill from the surgical center, a bill from the urologist, and a bill from the anesthesiologist, despite only going to one office for the whole thing.
I’m in the UK. From my first enquiry to the operation was about the same…
… but I didn’t get any bills after.
OECD data shows that wait times don’t significantly vary based on how a system is funded. The USA is just plain bad at wait times. That being said, the UK’s system is not the best example.
Where the fuck are you in the US that you do not have to wait for specialists? You living in Fantasy Land? Even a simple specialist like a dermatologist is a 2-3 month wait.
He said UK. We only wish we only needed to wait 2 weeks for a specialist.
Yeah I know, it was a cruel joke. But if you talk to a con about this, you’re sure to find this in their argument salad
The fucking nurse on staff that came to help me for a few minutes was not within my network.
Oh, that’s unfortunately quite common in that States – the hospital might be in your plan, but their own ER docs, etc. are technically contract employees who are not. So then you get out-of-network bills.
It’s f**ked up, bad, and has been for years.
Remember when the liars were telling us that we wouldn’t be able to choose our doctors without private insurance? We still cannot choose our doctors and also the ones chosen for us cost hundreds of thousands.
Remember when the liars were telling us…
Speaking of which, remember this whopper?
Apparently he’s more comfortable with insurance company executives doing it.
Not only are claim denials the real “death panels,” but all the same people saying that shit then told us our grandparents must die for the stock market in 2020. Constant liars and hypocrites.
For small wounds like that I generally recommend an urgent care clinic over the ER. Way cheaper and they can handle that shit. Save the ER for proper trauma.
Sure. If the urgent care is open.
God forbid you slice your hand open outside of regular business hours.
I used to get some random unexplained swelling in one leg. My wife has a family history of blood clots. I don’t , but that doesn’t keep her from panicking, or from inciting my own panic. Only way to know for sure that it’s not a clot, as far as anyone told me, is imaging…sonograms specifically.
I don’t think any urgent care around me has sonograms. It’s ER, or get PCP to refer out and have an appointment in 3 weeks.
If you Google “Ultrasound Machine” and look at the shopping listings, you’ll find more than a few entire fucking machines that cost less than half of just one of those visits. And what did I have for that time? A few hours of waiting, interspersed with 5 minutes with an ultrasound tech, and 20 seconds with a doctor telling me (in the hallway) that nothing was wrong.
Yes, this was general advice. If there’s no urgent care open and you need to see someone more immediately, go to the ER. For a cut that needs stitches, you can probably wait for the urgent care to open.
just learn to do it yourself, save even more!
Better yet, ignore it and save on materials costs too!
It’s illegal for them to send you a bill because a provider isn’t your network. One of the few good things passed under Trump. Lmk if you need any specific help or information in disputing that bill.
It has been years. I actually decided to move out of the USA. Paid the bill and decided to be more careful.
Or…you know, maybe drink a full Pedialyte
If he thinks five grand is a big hospital bill, he’s not living in the real world.
I wonder if he just noticed because it’s been capitalist hellscape for a long time now. Welcome to the trenches, fellow working class member. Your ability to have basic healthcare is based entirely around your ability to scrape enough money together between hospital visits. Failure to do so will have lifelong impacts, so I suggest you start eating cereal for dinner to save some cash for the next time you need basic human help.
Never been to the US before I guess 🤷♂️ He got off pretty light at 5k.
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Some people haven’t had the joy of being in the ED or receiving care at a hospital in the US.
Just don’t pay it. Nothing they can do about it.
Sending medical info to collections is a violation of HIPPA, just ask for the itemized list.
0 chance they’d give you any flak for anything under, say, a 250k heart surgery.
Hah! All of those foolish lawyers and politicians, their staff, all the lobbyists who wrote HIPAA (not HIPPA)…and not one thought “hey, you know, we should probably make sure that when people don’t pay their bills, there’s some recourse for the provider”. What a bunch of maroons.
This is only news to people who read Business Insider
I read some senator or congress-person suggested before about doing medical tourism instead. Like you go visit Spain or Norway to get your knee or spine fixed for cheap.
This is the most Patrick Starr™ solutions I’ve ever heard for medical care.
Mexico has a large medical tourism industry. Mostly for dental but other things too.
You can go on a ferry and get a nice vacation in a fairly tropical area, and get your needs met medically and go home for less than it would cost in the states with insurance.
Fuck this joker. He’s the IDIOT that said, as the SURGEON GENERAL, “Seriously people - STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!” (Tweet was then deleted). He should lose his medical license and be imprisoned for the excessive number of deaths his lies caused.
When exactly did he say this? At the beginning of the pandemic when things were still uncertain?
I’m sorry, but I have to disagree with you if he said that at the beginning. To be clear, I know masks were an effective protection against the coronavirus. But at that time there was a lot of uncertainty, first, and second, he was half-right: there was a shortage of masks, and medical professionals needed them at a very critical time. I followed that advice. Then when the CDC said “oops, no actually DO wear masks!” I started wearing them.
So… I’m not saying he was right. I’m just saying he should judge people in context. Don’t pile him up with the true idiot anti-mask bundle.
They were lying in order to get as many masks as possible to healthcare staff. Perhaps they saved more lives doing so
And perhaps they didn’t.
I’m not putting the full blame of the Anti-Covid nonsense on him - but that decision was certainly a factor…
Smart people understand that science is fallible. As more information becomes available, science can be corrected.
Covid denialism came out of mishandling that. People believing that since science wasn’t infallible, it can’t be trusted.
It’s a problem with the state of education in this country. Same reason why people don’t believe in gravity because “it’s just a theory”.
There is a distinct difference between science being fallible, and being told that Life Preserver Jackets won’t save you - while you’re on a sinking ship - and every medical professional around you goes to extreme lengths to acquire as many life preservers as possible.
They at no-point-in-time believed masks were pointless.
I get it. I really do. Doesn’t make it right.
Just in case:
Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected
I don’t agree with it, but I get it.
We had a very limited supply of masks in the country. Remember, we had people volunteering to stitch cloth masks or 3D printed “straps” for face shields…to donate to doctors and nurses who couldn’t get enough masks to stay safe. Breweries and distilleries were re-tooling to make hand sanitizer.
Meanwhile we were already at the start of the supply chain itself collapsing.
We were at a point where Trump was
hijackingintercepting shipments of masks toscalpredistribute them tothe highest bidderhospitals that needed them more.Now, if they had said that day “everyone needs to wear a mask in public”, that would have completely toppled the supply for hospitals, and I’d say it’s significantly more critical for frontline workers to have them than people who were able to hunker down and wait until Easter when the whole thing blows over (womp womp).
You know that any other messaging would’ve caused a rush on face masks and frontline workers, and probably made the whole thing worse.
In retrospect it’s easy to say that they should have been transparent about the messaging. But in retrospect, we also know that most people are selfish assholes.
Sure, and I agree it was a bad idea because it burned so much credibility. And secondly, I can’t imagine it making a real difference. Those who had the means to acquire masks at that time wouldn’t be dumb enough to believe it.
And I also agree that it’s good to remind everybody every once in a while.
But my main point is that they didn’t lie because they are bad people that were preparing the masses for a one world government - they did it because they saw hospital staff falling ill or dying at unsustainable rates and were willing to do almost anything to slow that.
They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching
That’s technically true, but the correct answer is more nuanced then the average adult has the attention span to understand or the character limit of twitter.
Masks are better at stopping the wearer from spreading it to other people, but a lot of people were getting infected through spit going into their eyes. Did this post occur during the mask shortage were even surgeons couldn’t get the masks they needed to do their work? The quote you gave said to stop buying masks, not to stop wearing them. Best practice was to use a reusable mask and face shield.
We’ve already had this discussion ad nauseum since 2020. It’s 2024. Just stop with spreading information that can fuel the anti-mask bullshit.
I understand that wearing eye protection can reduce the risk of catching the virus. But to say “masks are not effective” being technically true is irresponsible.
People only accepting simple answers are why so many people died. I never said masks aren’t effective. You reduced my comment until it lost it’s original meaning.
My GP claims to be trying to agitate her peers at conferences, focusing on the ones with chronic issues. She tells them, if they don’t advocate for patients, no-one will.
Lawyers don’t count, because by the time they enter the scene, the damage is done.
Broken by design
WELL DUH!?
Really, did you need to go to the ER to know that? Shit has been broken for a while now.
Lots of people think it’s only the uninsured that get screwed, but it’s common to get a surprise 5,000 bill a few weeks after you’ve paid your copay.
But here’s the trick:
As of July 2022 the credit bureaus no longer report medical debt. So just don’t pay the greedy fuckers.
