Forty years ago my neighbor spent three days in the hospital. His bill was horrendous. We looked at the itemized print-out and counted 97 bags of drip that were charged to him. I can’t remember what else we found, but the drip bags will stay in my mind forever.
I spent a week with sepsis. By the time I found all the overcharged garbage they knocked down the bill by half.
I was listening to a podcast with 2 DPC (direct primary care) doctors. These docs exclude insurance companies - everything is between the doc and patient. Patients pay a monthly fee (less than a gym membership) - can get appointments pretty much same day or next, can text doctor if something comes up - get actual HEALTH care rather than have health insurance.
Two examples talked about by the DPC docs:
Patient came in limping ... she was being treated for Type 2 Diabestes (getting rid of it), but the doc asked about the limp. She was having hip problems ... had been waiting over a year for an MRI. Doc asked if she could afford $300 because that was the price of an MRI he could get her .... she had her MRI the very same day.
One of the DPC docs got the medical records for a new patient. It looked like the patient had all these issues so he started asking about them. Oh, I see you have ‘this’ - no, I don’t have that. What about ‘this’? No, I don’t have that either. There were 4 or 5 conditions/diseases the patient was coded for and the patient had none of them. This was not an uncommon occurrence with medical files this doc was looking at (when he changed his practice to DPC, he was getting new patients). The gist of this is that patients are being “upcoded” many times .... the more codes a patient has, the more the doc gets paid .... sort of like those 97 drip bags.