One cat bite: A $55,000 hospital bill, including $16 for a generic Tylenol

[Newsjock]

Source: Los Angeles Times
By David Lazarus

Call it the $55,000 cat bite.

That's the rough total in medical costs (so far) for a cat bite on my hand that turned into an infection that turned into surgery that turned into a week in the hospital. Cruddy cat.

... All in all, the various services and supplies I received were priced at $52,660.53. The assorted doctor visits and physical-therapy appointments that have accompanied this mess added a few thousand more to the equation.

... My employer-provided insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, will cover $38,448 of the hospital bill. My total amount due: $1,504.47. That leaves $14,212.53 unaccounted for.

... Here's the long and short of it: Insurers demand discounts from hospitals in return for bringing them lots of patients. Hospitals, in turn, ridiculously inflate their prices so they can still turn a profit even after the insurer's discount kicks in.

Read more: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20130115,0,2980158,full.column

[NYC_SKP]

1. The uninsured users of emergency facilities and other services that you subsidized are grateful.

this is why we need...

Universal Healthcare NOW!

[lastlib]

2. END for-profit health insurance now!

[fleur-de-lisa]

4. ^^^ THIS ^^^ ! ! !

[silvershadow]

6. ^^Yep.^^

[FiveGoodMen]

8. Ab-so-lutely!

[HockeyMom]

3. Got a bug bite at work

Day Hab for DD population. My hand swelled up to 3x it's size. They had their own clinic. I spent all day seeing one specialist after another at their clinic. Totally FREE. They finally sent me to the pharamcy. Gave me a script (FREE) and said to stay home (PAID) until the swelling went down.

Any private business or private insurance do anyting like this?

[customerserviceguy]

5. The entire health care system uses sham pricing

Hell, I used to work for a company that sold surgical scopes, and we had a whole department of people devoted solely to figuring out exactly what price our sales reps were permitted to quote to various customers, depending on the "organization" they belonged to. It was important to get that right, lest the sales rep lost a sale because they quoted too high.

The only thing that is sold with more variation in price for the same damned thing is airline seats. At least there's a possible good reason for that, in that seats on a flight are like produce, they have a certain finite shelf life. It really doesn't work that way with a colonoscope. But they jam both of them up your ass.

[nick of time]

7. You can actually challenge alot of those costs.

When I got in my rollover accident, I had a bill of $70,000 for a 2 day stay at a hospital, my insurance paid about $60,000 and I challenged alot of the other items, like generic tylenol, bandages, little things like that, I ended up paying only $3,000 out of pocket.
Something you might want to look into.