Yes, people can rack up thousands of dollars in healthcare bills overnight, literally.
I have been thinking about all this ‘healthcare and insurance’ stuff lately. Trying very hard to step out of the current dysfunctional view and get something fresh.
A very disturbing thing I noticed was when the orthopedist bill arrived the other day...they billed me $545 for the aircast walking boot. I located the exact same boot, exact same boot brand new on Amazon for under $150. So, what truly justifies the orthopedist office charging $545 for an item they surely buy in bulk at a discount? The doctor charged $350 to look at my digital x-ray and determine the aircast was appropriate treatment. A physical therapist “fit” me for the small boot and instructed me on how to use it. Funny, I could have read the directions and ordered the $150 boot from Amazon. I won’t even get into the crazy billing from the trip to the ER several nights earlier.
The medical field has a captive consumer with often critical needs. Yes, these are ‘needs’ and not luxury wants like that fancy car parked next to me in the ER lot or the latest botox injection. Nobody wants to pay for someone else’s care, but we all do somewhere along the way.
Are we trying to ‘fix’ the wrong thing? I am beginning to strongly consider the premise that fixing health insurance is the contradiction. Healthcare has become so grossly expensive as to even make reasonable people unable to afford basic insurance. When doctors can gouge patients for products available in the market place because they have a captive consumer, something is evil in the system.
“Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.”
The answer isn’t going to be found in health insurance rules, regulations, or requirements. The health care field has priced itself out of the market. Unfortunately, like so many other things in modern life like electricity, heat, healthcare is a critical necessity to the modern infrastructure of life. We do have to find a way to provide it at a reasonable cost to all of us.
I had a physical therapist bill me $35.00
for a two page xeroxed copy of exercises for a pinched nerve.
I mailed the bill back to him telling him to KMA.
Google IV solutions, you can get a complete one on Amazon for about $15, in the hospital its $800. My last upper endoscope, I didn’t even get a IV, they just shot the Versed into a IV pic with a huge loaded needle. Yet I had to be dehydrated for the procedure. Not even offered a bottle or glass of water after. Just woke up said your done, get dressed and go home, doc will call with results. What was once a every 2 yr procedure is now a every 3 yr, Barrett’s Esophagus is a pre-cancer caused by PPI’s which means drugs like Nexium that was never meant to be a life long drug for GERD. Just short term.
Docs get kick backs for scripting for the latest fad drug, Big Pharma needs their monopoly broken up with the Stevens Act. FDA needs fixing, to many BAD drugs are making their way to market. And your doc is not warning you about them. I have Medwatch, and I get recalls, and new drugs in development, most would kill you if you looked up the side effects. If they didn’t addict you. Yet there they are advertising the crap on TV.
Crestor became the #1 Cholesterol drug with a multi-million $$ ad campaign, not that it worked better than Provachal at a fraction of the cost. In fact Crestor has a lot more side effects than the older Provachal.
No one says a word about OP drugs. EVERY ONE is FDA FLAGGED as dangerous, or Black Boxed which is the highest warning for Bone Cancer for Forteo. Reclast has a NO Asthma patient warning that is ignored, and the deaths from these drugs are hidden in the stats for broken hip complications. 1 Fosamax 10 mg pill and I’m in the ER with A-Fib.
Misdiagnosis is a large problem too. Which means you get treated for something you don’t have while the real culprit goes untreated.
Or you have a DUMB PCP who thinks they are an Endocrinologist, who has 4 extra yrs of training. Your Blood Sugar runs high because you took Vitamin C, Oh, you need a diabetes med. Come get this script, NO A1C1 or Ketone test, not test meter, but take this NOT a beginners drug that will put you in a diabetic coma or kill you. Since my eldest is a Type 2 I know what he has to do, eat, and what meds and testing he has to do. I have an ENDO for my thyroid, I should have been sent to the Specialist if a Blood Sugar issue was suspected. I had to have a hissy fit to get a test meter with 1 test strip per day. All I did was test, didn’t fill her script, A1C1 was 5.5 well under what they consider a diabetic. Glimipride is not a beginner’s drug, Metformin is the beginners drug.
Treating the 1.33 Million Chronic Pain Patients who have no cure for their conditions like street junkies and sending them to Pain Management is STUPIDITY, PM are just internist or GP’s not Specialist in ICC Bladder disease or Peripheral Neuropathy, that is a Neurologist field. And Specialist should be the one treating the patient, not some untrained in that field doc. Why do I have to pay $300 co-pay to P in a bottle for a month of pain med that barely works because DUMBO and his ACA mandated a 75% decrease in pain med scripting.
No bed in the hospital when you go in for BP issues, and you spend days in the ER at ER cost. $60K for 3 days. It is all a RACKET.
I had foot surgery at a local hospital last summer and my insurance paid for it. When I woke up and they sent me home I noticed this godawful shoe on my foot that there was no way I could walk on. We have tile floors and I almost slipped and fell because of the shoe. When I went to the doc a week later I asked didn’t they have something else. They said that was the shoe my insurance paid for. I asked if they had anything else I could purchase. $10 and I could walk again.
The shoe my insurance paid for could have sent me to the hospital with a bad fall which would have been quite a bit more expensive than maybe a dollar more for a better shoe. I just shook my head.