For those of you who aren't my FB friends:
I don't recall the number of times I've asked the doctors I know for an explanation about how medical bills are computed, but I do know that not one of them has ever had an answer. No one seems to have the slightest idea where the actual numbers come from.
I remember when I was billed several thousand dollars last year after my son had a few stitches in his forehead, for example. A very quick and simple visit to the ER, followed by a bill so outrageous I immediately questioned the legitimacy of the entire medical field. (Most of that bill was eventually written off, but the questions about how those initial, seemingly arbitrary numbers were derived remained.)
I think we've all lamented about this at one time or another. "Yes, but WHY does a 10-minute doctor visit cost $4,000? He didn't even do anything!" This Time article is a very long and very interesting read about that same issue, and the toll it's taking on our country. Take the time to read it and increase your understanding of how things happen and why. The markups for medical instruments and procedures at hospitals is absolutely staggering. $18 diabetes test strips that sell for 55 cents a piece on the open market, for example.
http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/
I don't recall the number of times I've asked the doctors I know for an explanation about how medical bills are computed, but I do know that not one of them has ever had an answer. No one seems to have the slightest idea where the actual numbers come from.
I remember when I was billed several thousand dollars last year after my son had a few stitches in his forehead, for example. A very quick and simple visit to the ER, followed by a bill so outrageous I immediately questioned the legitimacy of the entire medical field. (Most of that bill was eventually written off, but the questions about how those initial, seemingly arbitrary numbers were derived remained.)
I think we've all lamented about this at one time or another. "Yes, but WHY does a 10-minute doctor visit cost $4,000? He didn't even do anything!" This Time article is a very long and very interesting read about that same issue, and the toll it's taking on our country. Take the time to read it and increase your understanding of how things happen and why. The markups for medical instruments and procedures at hospitals is absolutely staggering. $18 diabetes test strips that sell for 55 cents a piece on the open market, for example.
http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/
When medical care becomes a matter of life and death, the money demanded by the health care ecosystem reaches a wholly different order of magnitude, churning out reams of bills to people who can’t focus on them, let alone pay them. Soon after he was diagnosed with lung cancer in January 2011, a patient whom I will call Steven D. and his wife Alice knew that they were only buying time. The crushing question was, How much is time really worth? As Alice, who makes about $40,000 a year running a child-care center in her home, explained, “[Steven] kept saying he wanted every last minute he could get, no matter what. But I had to be thinking about the cost and how all this debt would leave me and my daughter.”
By the time Steven D. died at his home in Northern California the following November, he had lived for an additional 11 months. And Alice had collected bills totaling $902,452. The family’s first bill — for $348,000 — which arrived when Steven got home from the Seton Medical Center in Daly City, Calif., was full of all the usual chargemaster profit grabs: $18 each for 88 diabetes-test strips that Amazon sells in boxes of 50 for $27.85; $24 each for 19 niacin pills that are sold in drugstores for about a nickel apiece.
There were also four boxes of sterile gauze pads for $77 each. None of that was considered part of what was provided in return for Seton’s facility charge for the intensive-care unit for two days at $13,225 a day, 12 days in the critical unit at $7,315 a day and one day in a standard room (all of which totaled $120,116 over 15 days). There was also $20,886 for CT scans and $24,251 for lab work. Alice responded to my question about the obvious overcharges on the bill for items like the diabetes-test strips or the gauze pads much as Mrs. Lincoln, according to the famous joke, might have had she been asked what she thought of the play. “Are you kidding?” she said. “I’m dealing with a husband who had just been told he has Stage IV cancer. That’s all I can focus on … You think I looked at the items on the bills? I just looked at the total.”