Here’s the secret nobody mentions...your health insurance didn’t pay that bill (the 85,000) either. They probably paid a small fraction of it because they have a contract with the hospital but if you as an individual were to pay it, the hospital would want the whole thing (you can negotiate, but you’ll never get the deal the major insurers do.)
My kid recently went to the ER in the middle of the night for a cut under his eye which was gaping and bleeding heavily (hopefully this teaches him a lesson about roughhousing with his cousins and the consequences, LOL.) He walked in, the cut was glued, not stitched. He was there about 15 minutes. He never saw a doctor, just a nurse...and his ER bill was $3000 (including the ER physician...which he never saw, LOL.) He asked for an itemized statement and got a bill from the hospital that listed the whole amount, no itemization whatsoever, they said it was a “standard fee.” His deductible for ER is 1000 bucks, so he owes the hospital $1000 but I told him to try to negotiate his part down. Absolutely ridiculous charges which could have been handled for 100 bucks if there had been an urgent care open at that time of night, but there wasn’t.
I take a med that’s been on the market for close to 15 years...yet that med cost $3500 per month (if I didn’t have insurance I wouldn’t be taking it.) But my question is why the high cost after all these years?
Until medical bills are reasonable, people wouldn’t be able to pay their own bills.
They paid $46,000, still big bucks for a 4 day stay.
As long as people don't pay their own bills, medical bills will never be reasonable.
He never saw a doctor, just a nurse...and his ER bill was $3000 (including the ER physician...which he never saw, LOL.)
That bill didn't just cover the few minutes of treatment your son received; it also covered the treatment of all those on Medicaid who don't have regular physicians so use the ER as their primary care facility, and all the illegals who go to the ER for "free" treatment.
Any kind of meaningful reform would include some cost-control measures on ER use: what would be the effect, for instance, if everyone walking into the ER had to pay an up front fee of $25, $50, or whatever, unless they had immediate life-threatening injuries (or, as we say in the military, immediate danger to "life, limb, or eyesight")? Wouldn't that cut down on the freeloaders?