Hospitals lift curtain on prices, reveals giant swings for hips, knees and more

Our local hospital tried to quote us for a routine fertility related procedure because we thought insurance wouldn't cover it. It took several hours on the phone before they figured it out. Day of the procedure they told us they forgot to factor something in and they gave us the wrong price.

They said it was fine though because insurance would actually cover it.

But they were wrong on that account too.

In comparison, the actual fertility clinic we went to was upfront and told us the price of everything ahead of time.

Everytime I've had to deal with a hospital the billing experience has been a nightmare. Fuck hospitals.

Only in the US among developing countries do you care.

My experience getting a COVID vaccination was eye opening. I walked into a large facility, provided ID, was asked screening questions, consulted with a provider about a medical issue and got the shot.

I work for an employer with a legacy PPO. I suffered a back injury, had a major surgery and 8 weeks of physical rehab. My out of pocket was a few hundred bucks. I didn’t lose a days pay because of sick leave at half pay and short term disability insurance. The people I was in rehab with were losing jobs, selling cars, facing complete ruin.

The lack of ethical standards and focus on profit over the general welfare of the people is gross.

The U.S. healthcare system cannot be fixed. Period. Full-stop. The only solution is to nuke it from orbit, pave it over, and start again. It's very easy to point the finger at the conservative party as the one who's screwed it all up, but the other parties are not really putting forward models for successful healthcare systems.

If one were to sit down and try to create the most absurd approach to healthcare that guaranteed high cost and poor outcomes you couldn't come up with the idiocy that our system has become. It's completely untenable, a failure at every single level from medical school to funeral services. The fact that there are so many smart people working in healthcare defies belief in the absolute fucking disaster it is.

Even in the interaction between health providers and insurance companies, the billing practices have moved so far beyond fraud and are so widespread that nobody can even comprehend or describe how fucking broken just that one part of it is.

Without getting into details, the healthcare industry is absolutely mortified of a law that requires them to provide patients expected costs before care and to publicize those cost for comparison. I can't believe that some startup hasn't glassdoored billing practices yet by patients simply uploading screenshots of their bills when they get them.

note we just went through a bizarre medical experience where surgery was billed out at a total of something like $70k, the "negotiated" price was more like $7k, and we payed out of pocket something like $700.

At one point the insurance company turned down the bill from the surgeon, who promptly simply submitted a bill from a "surgical assistant" who we never met or knew existed for the exact same dollar amount which was also denied, and then resubmitted the original bill which was approved and promptly "negotiated" to 10% of the original bill amount in the end. In the meanwhile we had absolutely no idea if we owed $30k for this bill, $30, $300, or $300k. No idea at all.

It beggars belief that congress, who is mostly made up of people who are obviously experiencing their own medical journeys, can't put together some easily bipartisan approaches to price visibility.

No, you’re right.

Capitalism makes this a really difficult problem, even if we’re just doing hypothetical scenarios.