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Bay Area couple shocked by $200K hospital bill for rabies shots

abc7news.com

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Re: Bay Area couple shocked by $200K hospital bill for rabies shots

#31

Post by pengaru »

paulpauper wrote: post #21

These sort of stories like these go viral. The amount paid is nowhere close to that, sometimes nothing is paid. The final price is always negotiated vastly lower. The patient often pays a tiny fraction of this. It's bad that this happens in the first place though. There is something wrong when people getting these outrageous bills in the first place. Hospitals send out these bills in the hope a tiny fraction of peopl…

> The amount paid is nowhere close to that, sometimes nothing is paid. The final price is always negotiated vastly lower.

Wow, look at the Stockholm Syndrome on this guy!

As if that's an acceptable normal process for anyone to be subjected to...

Re: Bay Area couple shocked by $200K hospital bill for rabies shots

#32

Post by 1letterunixname »

bagels wrote: post #24
1letterunixname wrote: post #15

That's a shitty bill. It's also insane that US doctors and hospitals aren't required to post prices, keep prices reasonably within an allowed range, and are allowed to price gouge customers for however much they want without limit. In Redding CA, I ran across a woman with a nasal infusion pump tube taped to her face in a coffee shop. She was hurriedly collecting paperwork for a hearing across the street. It turns out…

Hospital administrators don't take a hippocratic oath, unless they happened to also be doctors too.

Most were. Still, their staff do. But the point you're appearing to make normalizes injustice if they didn't happen to take an oath. What does this have to do with anything?

Re: Bay Area couple shocked by $200K hospital bill for rabies shots

#33

Post by switchbak »

notch898b wrote: post #2

I encountered a bat many years ago acting erratically inside the house. It had evidently entered in my sleep. I looked up the cost, and found out the household would be bankrupted by the shots and we would end up homeless. I calculated the danger from homelessness outweighed the risk of rabies. I guess the bet paid off, as we're now well past the 99th percentile of incubation period.

Dang. I don't have a lot of financial reasons to prefer living in Canada, but that's definitely one (for now at least).

That's rough though, lucky you didn't get sick. It's not a choice I'd like to make.

Re: Bay Area couple shocked by $200K hospital bill for rabies shots

#34

Post by 1letterunixname »

nradov wrote: post #30
1letterunixname wrote: post #15

That's a shitty bill. It's also insane that US doctors and hospitals aren't required to post prices, keep prices reasonably within an allowed range, and are allowed to price gouge customers for however much they want without limit. In Redding CA, I ran across a woman with a nasal infusion pump tube taped to her face in a coffee shop. She was hurriedly collecting paperwork for a hearing across the street. It turns out…

Hospitals have been required to post price lists for several years. https://www.cms.gov/hospital-price-transparency

Doesn't matter. Nothing has changed.

Re: Bay Area couple shocked by $200K hospital bill for rabies shots

#35

Post by dr_dshiv »

mongol wrote: post #8
notch898b wrote: post #2

I encountered a bat many years ago acting erratically inside the house. It had evidently entered in my sleep. I looked up the cost, and found out the household would be bankrupted by the shots and we would end up homeless. I calculated the danger from homelessness outweighed the risk of rabies. I guess the bet paid off, as we're now well past the 99th percentile of incubation period.

Can you get rabies still, theoretically, from this event?

25 years! https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3424805/

Re: Bay Area couple shocked by $200K hospital bill for rabies shots

#36

Post by rediguanayum »

Agreed while this is excessive, many hospitals do this to cover the uninsured who don't pay their bills. Hospitals have to care for such patients due to EMTALA. Consequently many non-academic hospitals are under huge financial stress (https://www.kqed.org/science/1981588/half-of-california-hosp...) and go after anyone that can pay to the point of bankrupting them. The US medical system is simply dysfunctional.

Re: Bay Area couple shocked by $200K hospital bill for rabies shots

#38

Post by dheera »

1letterunixname wrote: post #15

That's a shitty bill. It's also insane that US doctors and hospitals aren't required to post prices, keep prices reasonably within an allowed range, and are allowed to price gouge customers for however much they want without limit. In Redding CA, I ran across a woman with a nasal infusion pump tube taped to her face in a coffee shop. She was hurriedly collecting paperwork for a hearing across the street. It turns out…

I got charged $5000 for a 30-minute preventative echocardiogram (basically an ultrasound) that insurance was supposed to pay 100%.

20 emails later it's now at debt collectors, and I've contested the debt twice.

I'm ready to appear in court if I have to. I'm ready to pay $8K in lawyer fees to get rid of this $5K bill because it's wrong. I just don't want this to impact my credit score because it's not my debt.

I hate you, Stanford Healthcare.

Re: Bay Area couple shocked by $200K hospital bill for rabies shots

#40

Post by psychphysic »

So healthcare costs like 500-1k per month for the good stuff. And you still might have to pay through the nose for a £75 vaccine?

Or is this a case of bad insurance?

That the US can spy on the entire world but can't get its own people basic healthcare is shocking.

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