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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

#281

Post by Retric »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #257
Retric wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reall…

I’m pretty sure most of this is also what, say, EU has to deal with. They most certainly have bureaucracy, unpaid bills, 24/7/365 services, complex diasnosises…

Single payer largely avoids unpaid bills and a great deal of bureaucracy around billing. This is true even in the US, just look at the VA’s costs. The VA is serving a very expensive population and it does so relatively cheaply for the US. At least in terms of services rendered rather than just per person.

The 24/7 comment was in comparison to dentistry. It’s tempting to compare getting stitches to getting a filling but inherent overheads are associated with an ER which must be added to the bill.

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

#282

Post by blackhaz »

smabie wrote: post #48
blackhaz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people somewhere, with cigars, in $5,000 suits. "Look at all those schmucks! $400 per shot and $1,000 per stitch." The whole healthcare system needs to be regulated by the government end-to-end. All procurement must be transparent. Every cent traced. Pharma mafia dismantled - on a federal level.

Who are these people? Where are they? Not really convinced they exist.

These people are rarely public, you don't even need to know they exist. They exist behind the figures we see on the TV. Where there is money and a chance of corruption, they definitely exist.

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

#283

Post by mgkimsal »

300bps wrote: post #275
yohannparis wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you get into an accident (fall in the bathtub/stairs) cannot work for few weeks, your boss fire you easily... Where you is excellent health insurance coming from now? COBRA? That will not be $750/year.

This is completely wrong for many people. In the US we have something called FMLA and then I also have short term disability and long term disability. I have seen coworkers with cancer or even their family members with cancer and they take six months off with pay and come back like nothing happened. Be a valued employee at a large company. It’s a completely different situation in the US. It’s actually really good fro…

It is impossible for everyone to "be a valued employee at a large company". We could all be 'valued residents/citizens of a large country', but we're not.

Your "great health insurance" is provided by an employer who is factoring the costs of that in to the price they're charging others for goods/services. Other people are bearing the cost of your privilege. I have little doubt that most folks in your position and companies like yours will generally shop for the lower cost services/products, which will necessarily mean those other companies you're buying from will not be able to provide the "great health insurance" and similar benefits you enjoy.

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

#284

Post by xtracto »

For Americans that question why some other country has certain polinices or government that seem extremely crappy (say, Mexico crime struggle, Venezuela failed economic policy), healthcare is a good local example of a country's broken system which most citizens hate but that just cannot be reformed.

For a lot of these abuses, shit needs to hit the fan in some way like what happened in Egypt during the Arab risings. Otherwise it's a gradual decades process to move away from the status quo.

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

#285

Post by dheera »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #244
dheera wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But plumbers have to deal with a lot of nauseating stuff. "Amount of nauseating substances you have to deal with" should be a huge factor in pay rate.

What do you think doctors do? My last visit involved their fingers, a glove, and my butt.

Okay, so a $200 surcharge every time they have to deal with butts. $100 for urine, $50 for vomit. Charge it to the insurance anyway, they're used to paying $40000 a day for a hospital bed, they can pay $200 for dealing with a butt.

Plumbers have to deal with the aftermath of butts MUCH more often and they don't have the luxury of someone's insurance they can just throw arbitrarily high charges to.

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

#286

Post by xtracto »

mabbo wrote: post #204
hamilyon2 wrote: post #76

Most of the time I restrict myself from this kind of comments, but here is what experience is typically like in Russia. You are sick or even probably sick, like biten by tick and worry about it is infectious. You go to the neatest hospital, local ER, register yourself (no documents needed). Any time of day. You get triaged immediately, if your situation is not life-threatening, there is a queue. Waiting times are any…

This is the same in Canada. My wife is due to give birth in 3 months. The biggest bill we're concerned about is the parking lot. I think it's $20/day. And if the parking fee was too much, I've heard that one can go talk to the reception desk and they'll open the gate for you. I would rather pay very slightly higher taxes and let all of my fellow Canadians have this benefit than be very sightly richer and live in a so…

Exactly! For me it is the peace of mind: not having to worry about deductibles... will it be covered? What hospital can I go to? Ambulance or uber... so much stress. On top of your ailment.

I prefer to pay 35-40% in taxes and not have to worry about that. I worry about my work and my systems. They pay me for that. I pay my money so that I dont have to worry.

Paying (a private insurer) to get additional worries? No thanks.

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

#287

Post by sofixa »

trixie_ wrote: post #258
sofixa wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Free market brings prices down and quality up. The government tried to ‘help’ 50 years ago and now the prices have become so distorted that without government help you would need to be rich to go to school. People like you think the government should solve a problem that they themselves created.

> Free market brings prices down and quality up

In theory, but in practice there are many markets where that simply doesn't work, mostly due to natural monopolies, such as any type of infrastructure, healthcare or education, where competition is impractical or impossible, equal access for everyone is extremely important, and costs are high.

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

#288

Post by dheera »

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.

Possibly upto a point, if you factor in that the physician has to contend with paying back $400K in loans and $1M+ in lost income from not working during earlier years in life.

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

#289

Post by jjoonathan »

trixie_ wrote: post #205
jjoonathan wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our mostly private health care system is twice as expensive as the social systems in other developed countries because the government got involved? By what fraction will the new set of tweaks have to shrink costs to pay for the last 30 years of the private health care market's failure to deliver on its "more efficient" promise? Remember, it has to cut them by 50% just to break even, and it'll have to go further to ma…

There already is a massive public healthcare system in America called Medicare and Medicaid which is the root of distorted prices. The lack of price transparency adds fuel to the fire and allows those prices to stay high without any upfront awareness given to the end consumer.

Price transparency is shifting deck chairs on the titanic. I actually do think the new chair arrangement is a notable improvement on the old one -- but in an industry with unaddressed tectonic issues, it's not going to right the ship.

I might be wrong. Maybe price transparency will lead to a 50% reduction in prices in the next few years. I doubt it, though.

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

#290

Post by OJFord »

_puk wrote: post #123
iso1210 wrote: post #61

I had a gout flareup while in Washington DC for work. It's happened before, last time (in the UK) I phoned up the freephone national number for advice, my wife drove me to the local hospital, I walked (hobbled) in, had a couple of tests, was given some tablets and a presecription, and left in 15 minutes. That cost about $1.50 in gas parking would have cost another $5, but it was the weekend and parking was free. The…

"The prescription was $12 (standard price in the UK for any prescription drug or drugs, no matter what it is)" Just to note, in Wales all prescriptions are free. Can't speak for Scotland / NI.

While we're noting, they are pretty good about telling you/charging you less if it's something that's available off prescription (and was prescribed just to record the advice, or particularly because non-standard dosage advised, etc.) so £12 too much.

Like paracetamol say, you'd need a pretty hefty prescription to be able to buy enough all at once that £12 was a good deal. (A standard box is I think 24x500mg, good for three days (4h spacing, but 4x1g max is advised, not 6x) at max standard dosage, can buy two off the shelf for about £1, so you'd need a prescription for almost three months' worth, or a correspondingly higher dose...)

Also, £12 is the one-off price, there are better subscription type rates for people with medium/long-term recurring prescriptions.

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