Last month I went to my doctor’s office and ended up in the hospital (the whole story is here).
Here’s a list of the high points of the care (which was very good!) I received:
- The emergency room
- A few EKGs
- Some medication
- Saw a few doctors for a few minutes each
- Stayed overnight for observation
- Had a stress test
- Bunch of lab work
How much do you think 1 night in the hospital with pretty minimal usage of services costs?
$33,739
I’m not paying that much since I have health insurance and they have agreements that mean they are only paying a fraction of that cost… but if I didn’t have health insurance I’d be screwed.
I probably wouldn’t have went to the doctor’s in the first place and my heart would just have kept on beating oddly until I had heart failure or a stroke. Fun!
3 responses to “Do we need Healthcare reform?”
If you can’t afford 34k for a hospital visit, it’s clearly your fault because you’re not working hard enough. In fact, why are you forcing your insurance company to pay for this just because you gave them a little bit of money every month? The stockholders have to eat, too.
Your laziness is disgusting–stop being a freeloader and pull yourself up by your bootstraps. I would totally do the same thing if Daddy hadn’t already done it for me.
In April I suddenly became very short of breath, clearly something was wrong. I rang my doctor and he suggested a visit to the hospital just to be safe. Two weeks later I was fine again, after 14 days of in-hospital treatment, seven blood transfusions, MRI and CAT scans and daily pathology studies.
How much did it cost? Nothing.
Well not really nothing, there is a Medicare levy that’s added to my tax bill, that levy was $2k for the last financial year. The treatment would have been the same if I were unemployed. That’s the way medical system works down here (Australia).
So, as an outsider and an interested observer, “Do we need Healthcare reform?”, respectfully, “yes”.
What frosts me is your insurance company probably paid $4 -$5000 total. If someone without insurance had the same treatments AND OFFERED TO PAY CASH IMMEDIATELY, they’d get donged for the entire $34K. There’s just something wrong with how hospitals, drug companies,etc., calculate their prices.