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The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

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Re: The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

#221

Post by refurb »

LinAGKar wrote: post #97
refurb wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plastic surgery and vision correction industries work pretty well in the US. You see price competition and patients have the ability to shop around and make choices that are important to them (references from other patients, doctor personality, etc). Now contrast that with going to a hospital for a procedure where you have time to shop around. Can you get a price? No. Can you easily get appointments with doctors…

>What’s the difference? The difference is that one is completely optional and you can spend as much time as you want comparing options, while the other you're forced to do on a whim at whatever place is closest. You can't shop around when you're bleeding out, as in the article. And such emergency health care constitutes most of these surprise bill situations.

Basically what I said in my last paragraph?!?

Re: The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

#222

Post by hallway_monitor »

rsj_hn wrote: post #181
LightG wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I'll take all of that at face value and as given. It just sounds completely broken over there and I'm not sure I will manage to wrap my head around it. All I know is simpler systems around the world exist and work such that those 10 middle class families would never get stiffed like that, whilst also looking after the needy. I can't fathom it.

> It just sounds completely broken over there and I'm not sure I will manage to wrap my head around it. Agreed. But that's the way it is, and it's important to understand why it's this way. When Europe and Australia adopted national healthcare systems, the industry was ~3-5% of GDP. So at that point it wasn't politically strong enough to resist either nationalization or strict controls. Then healthcare mushroomed in…

I think we can all agree the US healthcare system is broken. The above describes exactly why it can't just be "fixed"; only after taking those steps would moving to a universal solution make sense. No one, including healthcare workers, wants to be downsized or get a pay cut.

Re: The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

#223

Post by sofixa »

trixie_ wrote: post #191
ElDji wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When free market doesn't work, free market advocates have their solution : there wasn't enough free market, so we need MORE free market.

A free market wouldn’t be dumb enough to give a teenager a loan for 100k. That idiocy is reserved for the government.

Hence the free market would have excluded any teenager who doesn't have rich parents from higher education. Hardly a good thing.

Re: The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

#224

Post by ModernMech »

My wife’s last ambulance ride was $1200 to take her to the hospital 4 miles away. They didn’t even do anything for her, just drover her there. I wish she had called an Uber — something like this makes me not want to call an ambulance ever again.

Re: The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

#225

Post by Retric »

refurb wrote: post #46
helloguillecl wrote: post #8

This is absurd. Even in a country with liberal economics and "free choice" health system (however with universal care, and state regulation), the same stitches in a world-class private clinic in Santiago, Chile would cost 400 USD, before insurance . The clinics there are not the ones Americans imagine from a middle-income country, most of them have better infrastructure and doctors than the ones I know in Europe. And…

The plastic surgery and vision correction industries work pretty well in the US. You see price competition and patients have the ability to shop around and make choices that are important to them (references from other patients, doctor personality, etc). Now contrast that with going to a hospital for a procedure where you have time to shop around. Can you get a price? No. Can you easily get appointments with doctors…

Dentistry is paid for by insurance and is relatively cheap either way. Healthcare in the US is expensive for several reasons. Excessive paperwork and bureaucracy, unpaid bills, required service, 24/7/365 services, complex diagnosis, lawsuits, medical school, regulatory capture, etc etc.

Changing any one of them isn’t going to fix pricing. We really need to change several pieces at the same time and the industry really doesn’t want lower prices as that reduces their income.

Re: The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

#226

Post by sgerenser »

code4tee wrote: post #164
donatj wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I paid $400 for a plumber to do 30 minutes of work this week. A doctor has more training and a lot higher infrastructure costs and overhead, and thus a higher hourly fee.

And yet ironically, in the US at least, there’s a decent chance that plumber actually makes more than a physician.

Unlikely, but if he does it’s because he’s the “owner of a plumbing business” not just a plumber.

Re: The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

#227

Post by lucidguppy »

thrower123 wrote: post #29

This is why you want to go to ConvenientMD or similar urgent care centers for anything not acutely life-threatening. It's usually faster than being seen at an ER, and costs an order of magnitude or more less - my insurance has a baseline fee of only $50 vs $600 for the ER.

My anectdata shows that urgent care centers do very little and get to charge whatever they want.

There's a reason they've popped up like weeds.

Re: The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

#228

Post by vadfa »

pietrovismara wrote: post #134
superfunny wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The state-provided health care is free" Today I learned that doctors and nurses in Russia work for nothing. No? So where does the money to pay them come from?

Public money, that as you might know comes from a variety of sources, including taxes. But to say some taxpayer is paying your "free" treatments is a grotesque simplification.

That means higher taxes, which are undesirable for some.

Re: The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

#229

Post by [deleted] »

trixie_ wrote: post #197
nameunimportant wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I got my tonsils removed my options were the $75k surgery at the private hospital, or waiting 3 months at the public hospital. I actually stopped consulting and took a job so that I could get insurance, and had the surgery two weeks later. A few years back I broke my wrist while bicycling across England. I was patched up and casted a few hours later, I think the bill was about $200, as a foreign tourist. It wasn…

The free market didn’t make your operation 75k. The government giving a blank check to hospitals and the lack of price transparency did that. Both are as far from the ‘free market’ as you can get.

[deleted]

Re: The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

#230

Post by soraki_soladead »

donatj wrote: post #136
LightG wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool story. So what you're saying is there is an horrendous creeping bueaucracy cost here. Funny, because that's exactly what free market proponents argue is the cause of inefficiency in publicly managed healthcare systems, and the reason to move towards models based on the US system. Someone is lying.

> Someone is lying. It’s you, to yourself. What we have is not by any stretch of the imagination a free market solution. It’s insane amounts of paper pushers created by the government. The whole insurance system we have is an impractical mess designed to fail. The free market would never have designed something so customer unfriendly, people would have gone elsewhere had competing solutions been allowed to exist. In…

> They don’t exist. They’re the imagined scapegoat for what is actually just a much harder to comprehend creeping bureaucracy cost.

> The whole insurance system we have is an impractical mess designed to fail.

You shifted the boogeyman from corporate suits to politicians in the space of a few comments. If nobody has malicious intent then nothing was "designed to fail". It just doesn't work as expected or wanted by anyone involved.

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