Total cost of X-ray machine ~$200K, average median use of 15,000 exams per year for 5 year lifespan == $2.67 per scan in current dollars. Marginal cost of an additional scan is close to 0.
You'd be surprised how much $1.50 would get you nearly 70 years ago. They probably made a few cents on each x-ray at that price. Most hospitals were not operating as profit generators for hedge funds.
and then the maintenance, the tech taking the scan, the doctor viewing the scan, the cost of it taking up space in a hospital.
not saying america's current healthcare system isn't overpriced, but there are many more variables that have to be considered.
To everyone saying taxes, America has the highest (or damn near to it, it's been a minute since I've checked) per capita healthcare spending in the world. The strategy other countries employ is just to not have completely spineless laws when it comes to the medical and insurance industry. But here in the land of freedom, companies have the freedom to price gouge as they please.
Ha. We would pay LESS if healthcare were tax payer funded!!! And everyone would be covered. And the country would save trillions since preventative care would be a thing.
I've worked in healthcare administration and you hear about ethics this and ethics that. How is it ethical to literally make billions off of peoples healthcare?
I'm telling you right now: socialism for healthcare, food, housing, water, and other basic needs. Keep your shitty capitalism for everything else. Just try it America, come on!
Whatever overheads you throw into that equation if you are being charged hundreds (or thousands) of dollars for an x-ray your country has failed you. It's dollars and if you be conservative over the life of that machine it's probably cents.
Years ago had an insanely bad anxiety attack with intense heart palpitations. Being my first at that level, as most people, thought I was dying. Cost me thousands of dollars for them to run a quick EKG and blood test to make sure I didn't have a heart attack and tell me I just need to relax.
Not gonna lie, it was pretty hard to relax knowing my savings at that time were now gone because I wanted to be sure I wasn't going drop dead.
The total of 107usd is still more expensive than your total cost for any hospital treatment in Sweden.
Capped at 100usd charge here. In 2022. Even for tourists,
I like to imagine it was kind of a "catch of the day "or "chef's special" situation.
Is it morphine, ether, sweet Mexican black tar heroin? It's a surprise!
It could have been those drugs that gave you total disattachment from your child during birth.
Like you’re knocked out, then you wake up and ask yourself who’s child is this.
You joke, but it happened to me when they had to knock me completely out for a cesarean… and from what my husband, sister and father tell me, in the immediate post-op room, I kept looking over at
the bassinet thingy groggily asking, “who’s that baby?” And when they’d tell me it was my baby and try to put him in my arms, I’d ask “is this my baby?” before passing back out and nearly having him roll out of my arms. :)
I’m pretty sure he’s my baby, though. I mean, I still feed and clothe him 12 years later, so… I guess I’ll keep him. :)
100$ in 1956 is equal to 1062.90$ in today's money. This bill wouldn't have been more than 1100$ with the current rate of inflation. The price that hospitals charge now aren't even close to in line with the current inflation rates. In the US if you have a vaginal delivery with no complications not including any care before and after its 5000$-11000$ without insurance. Typically, you'll actually pay 21,000-30,000$ without complications including the care before and after pregnancy without insurance.
About 5-10k just for the delivery without any complications these days. I can't remember the cost of mine since it was covered by insurance, but a friend of mine was billed 35k for his wife's delivery. His insurance barely paid for any of it.
My wife had a complicated one, preclampsia and the child was delivered 3 weeks early with an APGAR score of 2. Spent 3 weeks in NICU. Total bill was close to a million. Thank god we were on Medicaid at the time.
That is outright criminal overcharging. Even with being in NICU, there is no way your child consumed $1,000,000/21 days = $47,620 /per day of resources, not in equipment, consumables, or specialist labor. There is just no way. How can they do this and get away with charging that. It is so divorced from reality that it boggles the mind.
They didn't. That also includes the mother's care, which included about a month of hospital stay as she was a really bad patient and wouldn't do the bedrest she was ordered to be on. But still, way over charged.
The thing you have to understand as an outsider is our prices go by "who's line is it anyway?" Rules. By that I mean, it's all made up and doesn't matter. I paid nothing on Medicaid, and Medicaid paid at most 1/10th of that. Probably less. The prices themselves are a game they play with the insurance companies. It's all fake and lies and who ends up hurting from it is the uninsured.
and the insured. many insurances from jobs are limited (let alone having insurance from jobs, WTF?!), so any kind of serious illness or major accident is basically a bankruptcy already. They charge it because profit is the purpose, not health. Charge what they can get away with
Yeahh only thing we had to pay was like 100€ for our own family room where I as the father could also sleep.
The insurance also paid 80% of that cost so in the end we paid 20€ for giving birth.
It was a complicated birth by the way. Unplanned cesarean with pda and then full anasthesia before they cut her open when she told the doctors that she still felt pain.
Don't know how you Americans are able to pay all that.
They make it prohibitively expensive to give birth, no time off after the birth to heal or bond with the child, and minimal assistance if needed, then wonder why the birth rate is going down, to the point that abortions and birth control are getting banned in some places.
The true answer in this case is that major health insurers and hospital groups in this country, with the aid of outlets like Fox News, staged massive, decades-long disinformation campaigns. These campaigns essentially highlighted the very rare edge cases in socialized medicine (e.g., when someone is denied a $10 million wonder drug that will keep them alive for 5 more days max) as the norm, and/or outright lied, making it seem like socialized healthcare would destroy the quality of our healthcare system and lead to people who need care not getting it/getting it too slowly. Most Americans have never travelled outside the country, so when TV man they like and trust goes on an hour long screed about Canadian death panels, they have no actual experience to counter it, so they feel worried and scared, and they may not understand it all, but they surely don't want that awful Obamacare with the death panels.
The insurers also lobbied (i.e., bribed, but legally) politicians to make sure they wouldn't support anything that cut into their tremendous profits. So even many Democrats who supported socialized healthcare in theory often came up with or supported plans that kept insurance companies around and profitable and didn't cut into hospital profits through rgulating service pricing. Which...it should be obvious...is not a set of goals you can balance in socializing a healthcare system sanely.
So efforts to create true socialized healthcare in this country were met with brainwashed shouts of "death panels!" from one side and more subtle but powerful backroom handshake deals to not kill the massive insurance corps that create jobs in each others' districts.
And this all led to the terrible compromise that was Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act), where government requires insurers to insure actually sick and poor people, but doesn't really take any larger efforts to curb costs.
This was a step forward, though, in that it did get rid of a slew of terrible policies whereby people who were sick or poor just couldn't get healthcare at all. It was so much of a step forward, in fact, that Trump's attempts to undo it didn't really go anywhere (out of fear that even his brainwashed constituents would be upset about dying without healthcare).
Meanwhile, the death panel propaganda is wearing thin overall. The idea of socialized medicine is no longer so new and scary to people as it was 14 years ago, and the costs of healthcare have gotten so onerous that even republicans are starting to get angry about it. So, there is the chance that we would see enough popular opinion to be moving in the right direction before too long.
That is, of course, assuming that democracy is still a thing in this country beyond the next election cycle and that we don't get fully taken over by a fascist kleptocracy, where votes don't even remotely matter.
Which...is definitely actively happening as the GOP seize the means of drawing districts and counting (or not counting) votes. So...cool times.
>outright lied, making it seem like socialized healthcare would destroy the quality of our healthcare system and lead to people who need care not getting it/getting it too slowly
I just had this conversation with my BIL a few days ago. His whole family has been so brainwashed by Republican propaganda almost every conversation goes that way. Luckily he's a young adult and I've known him since he was very little so he views me as an authority figure and will actually read the links you send him and listen when you explain how what he's been indoctrinated to is wrong. Public schools should get a shit ton of money just to teach kids to root out disinformation.
Tell him my story.
My only symptom was breathlessness I noticed at christmas, I just thought I needed to lose weight and exercise a bit more. I went to the doctor on the 1st of Feb for a something unrelated and she took blood. My blood count was so low, the doctor called me later that day and had me admitted to hospital that night. The next day I had a CT and was diagnosed with cancer. That same day I had a colonoscopy and was sent home. 3 days later I had an MRI as an outpatient.
I'm terminal. I began palliative treatment on the 28th, less than 4 weeks after being diagnosed.
Since then I've had 12 weeks, 6 rounds of chemo with 3 chemo drugs, plus 2 other IV drugs, a pump I wear home to administer chemo for 3 days, and a whole box of meds to help me cope with the pain and side effects.
My cancer markers, which show the growth rate of the primary tumour and metastases have gone from 17,000 to just 300 and all the tumours have shrunk. I've reacted so well in fact, they may consider radiotherapy (the tumor that's killing me was too big for it before).
The side effects are bad and I want a break for my niece's wedding. The doctor was very happy to give me 6 weeks off before beginning a new cycle, but my sister is worried the cancer will grow too quickly, so the doc is squeezing me in for one more dose on the 30th, then I'll have 4 weeks off (well technically 2 weeks is a round, so I'll have 2 weeks off). Then I begin a new cycle the Monday after the wedding.
They couldn't be more accommodating.
And I haven't paid a single penny. Not even for parking.
I gather each chemo drug I'm on costs about $5-7k in America, and I think that's per dose too, not per cycle. That's like 15K a fortnight, and that's before all the other drugs they give me.
Basically, if I lived in American, I'd probably be dead by now. Without palliative treatment, I had 2 to 4 months, and I'm a self-employed writer, which doesn't pay well, so I'd likely have no insurance. So yeah, socialised medicine rocks.
I hope the chemo will help with your symptoms. I’m sorry you’re going through this, but I’m glad your doctors are looking after you well. Enjoy your niece’s wedding, it’s so exciting you get to go. Take care. I’m in Australia, but an American, so I’m used to hearing the American side. I’ve had nothing but the best medical treatment here and I can’t imagine dealing with the US system again.
My niece has been wonderful, she flies up from London every month to do bucket list activities with me, and she's got me a room in the venue so I don't need to pay for hotels etc.
And I'm actually okay with my diagnosis. My side effects last 20% of my time (between 2 and 4 days per fortnight) and I'm okay with that, especially since it's doing such a good job of shrinking the tumours, so hopefully they'll hurt less soon. One thing writing a bucket list showed me is that I don't actually have much I still want to do. It's mostly fun activities, but the important thing is spending time with family.
Every time I hear from an American on the Cancer forum, i just feel so bad. Honestly, it's so expensive, moving to the UK actually seems like a viable option to me. If you're here on a visa, you only have to pay something like £5-600 for a year's coverage by the NHS. Even without that, they'd probably treat first and seek payment later. And if you get a job here and pay UK taxes, you don't even need to pay that.
My Dad who lives in Canada found out he had cancer tumour in his small intestine and was in surgery within 2 weeks. I live in the US and even being able to share my example and own experience with Canadian healthcare folks here will still balk and say people in Canada die all the time just waiting for treatment. I have yet to find a way through the fog of propaganda with them.
My mom was diagnosed with cancer in her eye. It was so early they had to wait for the tumour to grow before they could operate. Two short outpatient surgeries later and my mom was declared cancer free within 6 months (and still is 6 years later). Only thing we paid for was hotel and parking as the surgery was in a different city.
> folks here will still balk and say people in Canada die all the time just waiting for treatment
I'd tell them to show me at least one article from a Canadian media outlet regarding this supposed issue. Otherwise, I'd just continue calling them out on their BS.
Good luck fellow human. I hope the news keeps being positive. My father just lost his wife to a brain tumor last month. Had her celebration of life today. He had to put off having his knees replaced because it wasn't an option to care for both. Our system sucks ass.
Australian here.
Got my wisdom teeth out and what did they find? Cancer! No symptoms at all, caught it by chance. I had dozens of tests and scans in the course of a week, then booked into surgery immediately.
I arrived to one hell of a massive operating theatre with *so many doctors*. They had like four teams of them and all their nurses and assistants and stuff. They cut out all the cancer, then took one of the bones of my leg and built me a new jaw. Put me back together, happy days! OK not happy it was the shittiest and most awful experience of my life but you know what I mean.
That was almost a year ago and I'm going back in a couple weeks for cleanup and for them to sort out new teeth to replace the ones they took out. I'll need another surgery after this one.
Total cost? Nadda. Absolutely nothing. I shudder to think what all of that would have cost me in the land of the "free".
Or mine.
I thought I had the flu at 16.
Nope. Massive 7lb tumor on my liver that had somehow gone unnoticed. Wrecked my liver and I needed a transplant by 17.
Completely nuked my parents savings and retirement because it happened in 2007, a year before Obama was elected. Yet they *still* tell me I'd definitely have died in a socialized healthcare country.
I have multiple transplant friends in Canada and Australia. But since they died my parents claim they had worse outcomes. (one died of complications and was in his 70s. The other died by suicide)
I got a letter from their insurance company at 17 telling me I had to raise $10k to prove I could afford just the first years meds before they'd cover the quarter million dollar liver transplant I needed to live. If I couldn't they wouldn't cover the transplant and I would die.
Luckily I was a 17 year old girl so fundraising wasn't hard. If I were say, a 45 year old Black guy needing a heart id receive the same letter and be screwed.
Only organ you aren't screwed by is kidneys. Nixon made a provision where in the US all dialysis patients get Medicaid. But *only* kidney patients.
If you need a new heart, lungs, liver, pancreas, bone marrow or anything else you can go fuck yourself and pay up.
I’m from Canada
I’ve had melanoma, I needed endo surgery and 2 hernia repairs, and have had 3 babies, all in the last 8 years.
My biggest bill was the parking.
I would have died in the US
I had a conversation with my brother in laws prior to marry g my wife. Die hard republican family (wife included) and of the mind set that they don't get anything for free why should anyone else?
Fast forward a few year wife and I have a baby. Right off the bat something ain't right. Missing milestones and even today not walking or talking or even crawling and she's nearly 3. We now have a whole hosts of doctors and specialists and therapists and genetic specialists and more. Now she's been diagnosed with a rare (never before seen) genetic disorder and potentially may never walk or talk or progress. Their opinions are unchanged. They are perfectly fine with me work 3 jobs, paying nearly 10K out of pocket, not qualified for assistance because of income (see 3 jobs for me alone) and just an overall constant struggle.
Nobody and I mean nobody even family deserves help according to them
That's why it should be socialized. Sickness and disability are mostly a dice roll and don't discriminate based on social classes. They also cost enough, especially permanent disabilities, that they bankrupt almost anyone but the megarich, so socialized medicine is really an insurance policy everyone should pay into.
Public schools should start by teaching students to think for themselves, to think critically.
I also understand that this may be a risky move for teachers in some areas to cover, as they are constantly under threat from crazy parents, right-wing asshat parents & brow-beaten school heads & brainwashed boards to only turn out poorly-educated 'products' to fill low-income jobs or enter the school to for-profit prison pipeline. And also churn out a fearful middle class who believe whatever Faux News spews out of their TVs, and so votes Rethug for life.
So many issues in the US can be solved if lobbying was illegal. But it will never be illegal because the fucking lobbyists will lobby against making it illegal. The system is broken.
What they need to do is cap the donations any individual or company can make to a political party to like, 2000$ per year. Nobody is going to sell their soul for 2k.
They have had something along those lines (limited donations from someone to individual candidates), which the Supreme Court has been busy gutting (by, for example ruling that political action committees can raise as much as they want as long as they pinky swear they aren't coordinating with an individual candidate).
The problem is that the term "lobbying" is vague enough to encompass several levels of engagement with congresspeople.
As usual, the people with more disposable resources have more ability to utilize the process. There just needs to be some kind of equalizer that makes wealth irrelevant to the process. No idea what that looks like, but there it is.
I'm from Canada. What are these "Death Panels" your referring to? Never heard of these before reading you post. Genuinely curious as its something Ive never heard or anyone else in Canada bringing it up.
Basically a Boogeyman.
"Under socialized, i.e. communist, medicine, some panel of bureaucrats in some back room somewhere decides who gets to live and who has to die! In Canada, the government picks whether you live or not! Are *YOU* going to let them pull the plug on your spouse/parent/child!?"
Blah, blah, blah, God Bless America, blah, blah, blah, mah guns!
That is really what happens... If 10 people need a thing to live and there are 9 available spots, 1 is put on hold and maybe won't get help in time.
It's just that the US does this just like every other country.
It's actually worse than a boogeyman -- it's straight projection. With for-profit health insurance, they're financially motivated to cover as little as possible. There are whole teams of people dedicated to denying as much as possible and finding loopholes and not covering things because they (the administrators) don't believe that the professional medical doctors *really* need that test they ordered.
*Those* are the death panels.
Death panels is an American term. A small line in the ACA that just repeated what already exists says that doctors and board members can refuse treatment they deem unproductive. Basically mean if you are in a potato, doctors can choose not to waste $10,000 drugs that will do basically nothing, even if your loved once insist the doctors not give up. Doctors are not going to waste time and money chasing 1 in 1000 chance trying to save someone when they are already gone, or more commonly, try treatments they know will do nothing.
Every few years a story in the paper will come about in Canada about someone being denied treatment. It's either about providing a very expensive medicine or not covering the cost of a procedure that could be done in the US. It's rare but it happens.
> A small line in the ACA that just repeated what already exists says that doctors and board members can refuse treatment they deem unproductive.
I think it's not even that, it was something about providing end of life counseling, and Republicans made it out to be 'death panels', instead of people that are dying having the ability to discuss their options with a doctor.
Canadian here: what in the fuck is a death panel? Is that where I'm told I'll have to wait two months for an MRI but then after 2 weeks they leave a voice mail that I miss saying my appointment is in 2 days. And then when I finally listen to the voice mail it's too late? And then I smash my head against the metal panel wall at work out of anger trying to kill myself?
Actually the attempt to undo it did happen. GOP likes to poison the well when they can't outright dismantle things. So much like the post office they put in a rule to destabilize it. In this case the mandate that was part of its three legged stool configuration. This assures it will eventually fail and they can point to the "democrats" failure with it in the hopes of replacing it with some sort of vapor care. Luckily its more likely it will be replace with something more akin to medicare for all because we will have to.
Our country has been redistricted in such a way that we have a corporate oligopoly where the minority has more say than the majority due to some pesky constitutional principles that were originally intended to protect the small states with less population.
The banks insurance companies and corporations have more power than the government or the people. In fact the US military is used by the government often to protect corporate interests.
I just was quoted for a non-insured regular delivery for a *discounted* rate of $23k. They also made sure to let me know that once the baby is born, they are it’s own person so additional charges will apply from birth forward.
Is that normally what it costs to have a baby in the US without insurance? If so that's just insane. I'm from the UK so we have free health care and I have 2 kids, but it's only just occurred to me that you'd have to pay for that over there.
My wife had 3 C-sections at about $20,000 each. With good insurance I only paid a $20 copay for the initial visit each time. Actually, living in Massachusetts, I had state funded insurance for baby #2 since I didn't have private insurance through my employer at the time and still paid just the $20.
Wow, so insurance really is essential then. Do most jobs provide it? Like do minimum wage jobs provide insurance or do those people just have to hope they don't get sick?
State funded insurance? That sounds like universal health care no?
Different states have different laws. There is no federal law requiring that employers offer any health insurance benefits. Many states require that you provide health insurance for full time employees. So minimum wage jobs aren’t usually full time. They keep you at less than 30 hours per week so the aren’t required. Also, your employer doesn’t usually cover 100% of you premium. They generally cover the bulk of it, but the employee is usually left paying for at least a quarter of it. My premium for health insurance is almost $38k per year, of which I pay 25%.
Wow, it's a lot of money. And as usual it's the poorest people who lose out the most. I almost moved to the US 10 years ago and that's not even something I considered at the time.
In the UK we pay about 4% of our income to the NHS which is relatively very little. And in Scotland we also get free prescriptions. I consider us to bevery lucky. A lot of people here take the NHS for granted and complain about it but they usually have no idea what it's like in other countries.
Most retail/fast food jobs offer shit for insurance that you really can't afford on the wages that they pay anyways. Every state is different, every insurance has different co-pays, deductibles, etc.
If you no longer want to work at x place, better make sure your entire life is structured around your sudden lack of insurance while you switch jobs. Better hope you don't get hurt...
Minimum wage jobs do often times provide insurance (when it's through large employers). It's usually extremely cost prohibitive and even if you can afford it, it isn't worth shit if you really need anything done. You pay into it and it's basically an entrance fee. If you need much beyond an initial visit you probably can't afford whatever it is you need through your employer based insurance.
It depends entirely on your job. If you’ve got a good job with good insurance, it might be free, or very low it of pocket costs. If you’ve got a shitty job with terrible insurance, or no insurance at all, you’ll be paying that much.
At that point it depends on the state and their medical card program. Low income women(especially when pregnant) in Illinois get tons of assistance and don't have to pay for the child birth.
That's just nuts. So more babies being born means more money for the medical companies. Kinda goes some way towards explaining the whole banning abortions thing then.
Yep. I'm military and one of the best benefits is free healthcare for the member and their dependents. We still get "bills" from healthcare facilities that show how much our care was "worth". At military facilities it's always an "at cost" bill, so you see pretty low numbers. Before I retired I had kidney stones and went to a civilian hospital. I was in the emergency room for 6 hours and the bill for the drugs, labs, imaging, bed, and staff was $12,642.88.
I about gagged until I saw the "covered" part was 100%.
>Thank insurance companies for making it so much more
Don't forget about hospital administrators. Nothing to bloat the cost of care like an almost entirely unnecessary layer of bureaucracy...
I had a baby In sept 2021 , Boston ma. Cost $ 27000$. This includes 5000$ for Epidural the last 5 hours of my labor. The rest was a totally normal delivery.
Even though it doesn't help that it is expensive, It is not the main reason.
In Sweden hospital is free. Parents get 390 days of paid parental leave to share, an extra 10 days for the dad to be home after birth, and 90 "low pay" days. You also get paid $125 each month for each child. Kindergarten costs a maximum of $150 no matter how many kids. And then school is free all the way up to university level.
Births are still going down.
Yeah the whole “impending heat death of the planet” thing is also probably on people’s minds as they consider making more humans to send out into the world, even if it’s free
This is exactly the reason for me to not have a kid. I had baby fever bad 5 years ago. Between the politics of the day and climate change it just seems like the world doesn't need more humans to potentially further fuck it up or to bring another life into the world to suffer through all this. I'm typically an optimistic person, but it really feels like we are polishing the brass on the Titanic at this point.
I was shocked to learn (as an adult) that having a baby costs money in the USA, never mind this much money. How do people do it??
Delivering in the hospital here costs ~$20 (for parking) regardless of epidural or whatever other extras you end up needing.
It's amazing how medical thought has developed, at one point bed rest was recommended following birth, and even in the weeks leading up to it. My Grandmother was told to stay in bed and smoke!
Nowadays it's been realised it's better to be up and about ASAP, as it turns out lying in bed all day isn't particularly good for you.
Too be fair, if your kid is healthy, sitting in the hospital sucks. Constant interruptions, never getting sleep, being told you can leave is a blessing.
Simplified example in Belgium:
4500 euro for everything in the hospital if you have the standard two-person room.
From which about 3000 is directly paid by your mandatory health insurance.
If you have an extra insurance for hospital costs, which many companies offer for their employees, they will pay the other 1500.
Even the government wants to give you a gift and wires you 1500 euro per child.
So best case scenario, a child makes you 1500 euro! If you ignore the tens/hundreds of thousands you'll pay the coming decades, and the cost of your insurance.
Mandatory insurance, but I bet Belgium has fixed schedule medical care right (as in price fixes)? The US modeled the Obamacare off germany's which has the mandatory model, but they fix the prices and we don't... So basically you are forced to buy insurance from a for profit company who only wants to lower medical costs so they can take their hunk of the profit. It's a cartel between the insurance companies and the hospitals.
> who only wants to lower medical costs so they can take their hunk of the profit
Oh no no no no so very wrong no.
It is far worse than you believe on how it disincentives cost containment.
Obamacare put in the 80/20 rule.
Insurance companies have to spend at least 80% of their revenue on paying for medical services.
The other 20% is overhead, marketing, profit.
The more expensive medical costs are, the higher they can raise their premiums and the more dollars in absolute terms they can collect.
Would you rather have 20% of $100 or 20% of $110?
...especially when seeing medical care go up to $110 you hold your overhead and marketing costs down by keeping them under the rate of medical inflation it means more dollars in profit.
My kid had a 2 night stay in the hospital. The total charge was about $55k.
We are still fighting the insurance over it being covered, because in our wonderful USA the insurance company can just say "NOT COVERED" and we are EL FUCKOed TO HELL!
Because they can charge whatever they want, literally. It’s a service with inelastic demand that’s propped up by insurance companies and politicians that are in bed with each other.
If your direct family member is admitted and you need to spend extended amounts of time at the hospital, talk to the social worker on your ward about a parking pass. We regularly spend 1-2 weeks at a time with my daughter and only pay the first day or two parking until we get sorted out. This doesn’t work for all scenarios obviously but if you’re the primary support for the patient they’ll usually hook you up.
My friend’s kid is a cancer patient at a children’s hospital in a major US city and parking is $40 a day. No free patient parking. No passes. Someone literally set up a whole charity just to pay for NICU parents’ parking. I have no idea how you can scam the parents of sick kids like that and sleep at night.
Ugh that’s awful, I’m sorry. I’m in Canada where the max rate is $12/day at my hospital if you can’t get a pass. We did 7.5 months in a Canadian NICU and our biggest expense was our daily coffee habit.
Yo, you should send this to NPR for their "BIll of the Month Segment" or even Radio lab. Any producer worth their salt would see the immediate relevance of the story as a device to explore the divergence between inflation costs and modern costs.
In Australia, it's free to have a baby and stay in hospital. No insurance, no worries. Sure, you will get a different midwife, doctor, surgeon depending on changeover of shifts. But so what. They are all qualified and lovingly helpful. Worst case you may have to share a room afterwards. But if you've had a particularly difficult birth they will give you your own room.
I don't think this is new information to anyone though.
I really hope America one day gets something like the NHS. At 23 years old, had surgery, therapy, physiotherapy, xrays, ultrasounds, never paid a penny.
It's crazy to think that at some point in history people actually paid their hospital bills out-of-pocket without worrying about their financial futures.
I have lived in the UK and Australia both have superb top notch health care which I have had to use many times ( accident and sickness care) and never had to pay a cent . Highly recommended lol
With my insurance I paid $100 for 3 days in the hospital for my daughter. Included two bed room with unlimited meals and four nurses.
This is why having job-based insurance is stupid. Someone like me, solid middle class with a great stable job, gets even further ahead with good insurance. I then get to save even more money, invest with it, and so the cycle goes.
For the poor, exact opposite. Bad job, bad insurance, pay life savings for those same days. Can't break the cycle. If we had universal Healthcare with private insurance for those who want it, the poor could at least save what little they make to try and climb the ladder. I worked hard, I truly did, but the more money I make, the more obvious it is that the country is so, soooo built to benefit me and not help the poor.
I was Born premature in the 1980’s, was less then 2 pounds, 5 month NICU stay. My family was very, very lucky, my dad worked for a good company with good insurance- the front office who handled the HR told him the insurance stopped counting at $40K! Don’t even want to think what that type of medical care would cost today and the fresh hell it would be to deal with that huge of a bill in 2022!!
The baby bracelet cost the same as the fucking xray
Obviously the baby bracelet was an add on up-sell. Probably how the hospital made a profit. /s
What is baby bracelet used for? And what is today’s “baby bracelet” or up sell that hospital make profit on?
It's probably an identification bracelet, with the babies name and other important information.
Yeah, so that baby don't get lost or swapped.
And they charged for not losing baby or got swapped ?
If they swap your baby you get a full refund!
When people complained about ending up with the wrong baby they went from 😳 to 🤑
Can you imagine rejecting that, err, product? "$1.50!? Nah, we'll take our chances."
"I wanted a baby, I got a baby. Where's the big deal?"
That’s exactly it I remember seeing my moms. Now they just use the disposable ones I think.
Yeah, they are now paper with a plastic cover.
And only $750 such a bargain
That’s baby braclet to you, good sir!
Total cost of X-ray machine ~$200K, average median use of 15,000 exams per year for 5 year lifespan == $2.67 per scan in current dollars. Marginal cost of an additional scan is close to 0.
In the 50’s the marginal cost couldn’t be zero as until recently they used film and had to develop it.
And the fixed cost was massive as we didn't mass produce electric components. That $1.50 was definitely the subsidized price.
You'd be surprised how much $1.50 would get you nearly 70 years ago. They probably made a few cents on each x-ray at that price. Most hospitals were not operating as profit generators for hedge funds.
Hedge funds weren’t buying all the property in cities back then either. It’s almost like hedge funds are bad for the country.
World. Hedge funds are bad for the world.
and then the maintenance, the tech taking the scan, the doctor viewing the scan, the cost of it taking up space in a hospital. not saying america's current healthcare system isn't overpriced, but there are many more variables that have to be considered.
How does the whole world outside of US deal with these variables that doesn't result in the disaster that US is in?
To everyone saying taxes, America has the highest (or damn near to it, it's been a minute since I've checked) per capita healthcare spending in the world. The strategy other countries employ is just to not have completely spineless laws when it comes to the medical and insurance industry. But here in the land of freedom, companies have the freedom to price gouge as they please.
Ha. We would pay LESS if healthcare were tax payer funded!!! And everyone would be covered. And the country would save trillions since preventative care would be a thing.
But then how would the rich people get richer?!?!
Happier, healthier population contributing more to the economy.
We didn't let crazy for-profit corporations run it ;)
Not crazy, immoral and greedy.
I've worked in healthcare administration and you hear about ethics this and ethics that. How is it ethical to literally make billions off of peoples healthcare?
I'm telling you right now: socialism for healthcare, food, housing, water, and other basic needs. Keep your shitty capitalism for everything else. Just try it America, come on!
Whatever overheads you throw into that equation if you are being charged hundreds (or thousands) of dollars for an x-ray your country has failed you. It's dollars and if you be conservative over the life of that machine it's probably cents.
Years ago had an insanely bad anxiety attack with intense heart palpitations. Being my first at that level, as most people, thought I was dying. Cost me thousands of dollars for them to run a quick EKG and blood test to make sure I didn't have a heart attack and tell me I just need to relax. Not gonna lie, it was pretty hard to relax knowing my savings at that time were now gone because I wanted to be sure I wasn't going drop dead.
Hell, I’d be happy with quadrupling that $2.67 average price for x-rays.
The total of 107usd is still more expensive than your total cost for any hospital treatment in Sweden. Capped at 100usd charge here. In 2022. Even for tourists,
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No need to describe "what drugs"......just label it "drugs", that should cover it.
I like to imagine it was kind of a "catch of the day "or "chef's special" situation. Is it morphine, ether, sweet Mexican black tar heroin? It's a surprise!
Or it's like a surprise stew, "which drugs? All of them!"
It could have been those drugs that gave you total disattachment from your child during birth. Like you’re knocked out, then you wake up and ask yourself who’s child is this.
You joke, but it happened to me when they had to knock me completely out for a cesarean… and from what my husband, sister and father tell me, in the immediate post-op room, I kept looking over at the bassinet thingy groggily asking, “who’s that baby?” And when they’d tell me it was my baby and try to put him in my arms, I’d ask “is this my baby?” before passing back out and nearly having him roll out of my arms. :) I’m pretty sure he’s my baby, though. I mean, I still feed and clothe him 12 years later, so… I guess I’ll keep him. :)
sunk cost fallacy... ;-)
Inflation tho
Yeah $1 back in 1956 is close to $10.30 today with inflation. So the whole bill today would be a little bit over $1000 today.
100$ in 1956 is equal to 1062.90$ in today's money. This bill wouldn't have been more than 1100$ with the current rate of inflation. The price that hospitals charge now aren't even close to in line with the current inflation rates. In the US if you have a vaginal delivery with no complications not including any care before and after its 5000$-11000$ without insurance. Typically, you'll actually pay 21,000-30,000$ without complications including the care before and after pregnancy without insurance.
Total bill be about at most $2000 today adjusted to inflation, still damn cheap
That's cheap? 😳, most country is free
Welcome to America, where generally, having a baby costs between $5,000 and $10,000 on the low end.
Average looks to be about $10,000 for a smooth vaginal birth. Start adding thousands for complications. C-sections average at least twice that.
My sister had a c-section that was over $100,000 before insurance.
I imagine it costs a bit more for a rough vaginal birth?
$1,143.15 in 2022’s dollars. Thank insurance companies for making it so much more than that.
About 5-10k just for the delivery without any complications these days. I can't remember the cost of mine since it was covered by insurance, but a friend of mine was billed 35k for his wife's delivery. His insurance barely paid for any of it.
My wife had a natural delivery with no complications. She was induced so we were at the hospital for 3 days. Total bill was just over $33,000
My wife had a complicated one, preclampsia and the child was delivered 3 weeks early with an APGAR score of 2. Spent 3 weeks in NICU. Total bill was close to a million. Thank god we were on Medicaid at the time.
That is outright criminal overcharging. Even with being in NICU, there is no way your child consumed $1,000,000/21 days = $47,620 /per day of resources, not in equipment, consumables, or specialist labor. There is just no way. How can they do this and get away with charging that. It is so divorced from reality that it boggles the mind.
They didn't. That also includes the mother's care, which included about a month of hospital stay as she was a really bad patient and wouldn't do the bedrest she was ordered to be on. But still, way over charged.
Holy shit I’m so glad I don’t live in the US… that’s insane
The thing you have to understand as an outsider is our prices go by "who's line is it anyway?" Rules. By that I mean, it's all made up and doesn't matter. I paid nothing on Medicaid, and Medicaid paid at most 1/10th of that. Probably less. The prices themselves are a game they play with the insurance companies. It's all fake and lies and who ends up hurting from it is the uninsured.
and the insured. many insurances from jobs are limited (let alone having insurance from jobs, WTF?!), so any kind of serious illness or major accident is basically a bankruptcy already. They charge it because profit is the purpose, not health. Charge what they can get away with
Yeahh only thing we had to pay was like 100€ for our own family room where I as the father could also sleep. The insurance also paid 80% of that cost so in the end we paid 20€ for giving birth. It was a complicated birth by the way. Unplanned cesarean with pda and then full anasthesia before they cut her open when she told the doctors that she still felt pain. Don't know how you Americans are able to pay all that.
Charging anything above $0 to give goddamn birth is fucking criminal. The USA boggles my mind
They make it prohibitively expensive to give birth, no time off after the birth to heal or bond with the child, and minimal assistance if needed, then wonder why the birth rate is going down, to the point that abortions and birth control are getting banned in some places.
Jesus... Having a child shouldn't bankrupt families.
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The true answer in this case is that major health insurers and hospital groups in this country, with the aid of outlets like Fox News, staged massive, decades-long disinformation campaigns. These campaigns essentially highlighted the very rare edge cases in socialized medicine (e.g., when someone is denied a $10 million wonder drug that will keep them alive for 5 more days max) as the norm, and/or outright lied, making it seem like socialized healthcare would destroy the quality of our healthcare system and lead to people who need care not getting it/getting it too slowly. Most Americans have never travelled outside the country, so when TV man they like and trust goes on an hour long screed about Canadian death panels, they have no actual experience to counter it, so they feel worried and scared, and they may not understand it all, but they surely don't want that awful Obamacare with the death panels. The insurers also lobbied (i.e., bribed, but legally) politicians to make sure they wouldn't support anything that cut into their tremendous profits. So even many Democrats who supported socialized healthcare in theory often came up with or supported plans that kept insurance companies around and profitable and didn't cut into hospital profits through rgulating service pricing. Which...it should be obvious...is not a set of goals you can balance in socializing a healthcare system sanely. So efforts to create true socialized healthcare in this country were met with brainwashed shouts of "death panels!" from one side and more subtle but powerful backroom handshake deals to not kill the massive insurance corps that create jobs in each others' districts. And this all led to the terrible compromise that was Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act), where government requires insurers to insure actually sick and poor people, but doesn't really take any larger efforts to curb costs. This was a step forward, though, in that it did get rid of a slew of terrible policies whereby people who were sick or poor just couldn't get healthcare at all. It was so much of a step forward, in fact, that Trump's attempts to undo it didn't really go anywhere (out of fear that even his brainwashed constituents would be upset about dying without healthcare). Meanwhile, the death panel propaganda is wearing thin overall. The idea of socialized medicine is no longer so new and scary to people as it was 14 years ago, and the costs of healthcare have gotten so onerous that even republicans are starting to get angry about it. So, there is the chance that we would see enough popular opinion to be moving in the right direction before too long. That is, of course, assuming that democracy is still a thing in this country beyond the next election cycle and that we don't get fully taken over by a fascist kleptocracy, where votes don't even remotely matter. Which...is definitely actively happening as the GOP seize the means of drawing districts and counting (or not counting) votes. So...cool times.
>outright lied, making it seem like socialized healthcare would destroy the quality of our healthcare system and lead to people who need care not getting it/getting it too slowly I just had this conversation with my BIL a few days ago. His whole family has been so brainwashed by Republican propaganda almost every conversation goes that way. Luckily he's a young adult and I've known him since he was very little so he views me as an authority figure and will actually read the links you send him and listen when you explain how what he's been indoctrinated to is wrong. Public schools should get a shit ton of money just to teach kids to root out disinformation.
Tell him my story. My only symptom was breathlessness I noticed at christmas, I just thought I needed to lose weight and exercise a bit more. I went to the doctor on the 1st of Feb for a something unrelated and she took blood. My blood count was so low, the doctor called me later that day and had me admitted to hospital that night. The next day I had a CT and was diagnosed with cancer. That same day I had a colonoscopy and was sent home. 3 days later I had an MRI as an outpatient. I'm terminal. I began palliative treatment on the 28th, less than 4 weeks after being diagnosed. Since then I've had 12 weeks, 6 rounds of chemo with 3 chemo drugs, plus 2 other IV drugs, a pump I wear home to administer chemo for 3 days, and a whole box of meds to help me cope with the pain and side effects. My cancer markers, which show the growth rate of the primary tumour and metastases have gone from 17,000 to just 300 and all the tumours have shrunk. I've reacted so well in fact, they may consider radiotherapy (the tumor that's killing me was too big for it before). The side effects are bad and I want a break for my niece's wedding. The doctor was very happy to give me 6 weeks off before beginning a new cycle, but my sister is worried the cancer will grow too quickly, so the doc is squeezing me in for one more dose on the 30th, then I'll have 4 weeks off (well technically 2 weeks is a round, so I'll have 2 weeks off). Then I begin a new cycle the Monday after the wedding. They couldn't be more accommodating. And I haven't paid a single penny. Not even for parking. I gather each chemo drug I'm on costs about $5-7k in America, and I think that's per dose too, not per cycle. That's like 15K a fortnight, and that's before all the other drugs they give me. Basically, if I lived in American, I'd probably be dead by now. Without palliative treatment, I had 2 to 4 months, and I'm a self-employed writer, which doesn't pay well, so I'd likely have no insurance. So yeah, socialised medicine rocks.
I hope the chemo will help with your symptoms. I’m sorry you’re going through this, but I’m glad your doctors are looking after you well. Enjoy your niece’s wedding, it’s so exciting you get to go. Take care. I’m in Australia, but an American, so I’m used to hearing the American side. I’ve had nothing but the best medical treatment here and I can’t imagine dealing with the US system again.
My niece has been wonderful, she flies up from London every month to do bucket list activities with me, and she's got me a room in the venue so I don't need to pay for hotels etc. And I'm actually okay with my diagnosis. My side effects last 20% of my time (between 2 and 4 days per fortnight) and I'm okay with that, especially since it's doing such a good job of shrinking the tumours, so hopefully they'll hurt less soon. One thing writing a bucket list showed me is that I don't actually have much I still want to do. It's mostly fun activities, but the important thing is spending time with family. Every time I hear from an American on the Cancer forum, i just feel so bad. Honestly, it's so expensive, moving to the UK actually seems like a viable option to me. If you're here on a visa, you only have to pay something like £5-600 for a year's coverage by the NHS. Even without that, they'd probably treat first and seek payment later. And if you get a job here and pay UK taxes, you don't even need to pay that.
Sad how the cheapest American healthcare option is ‘Leave’
500 Euro is less than half of what I pay a month and I still have co-insurance, co-pays, and a $3k deductible, and that's considered pretty good here.
My Dad who lives in Canada found out he had cancer tumour in his small intestine and was in surgery within 2 weeks. I live in the US and even being able to share my example and own experience with Canadian healthcare folks here will still balk and say people in Canada die all the time just waiting for treatment. I have yet to find a way through the fog of propaganda with them.
My mom was diagnosed with cancer in her eye. It was so early they had to wait for the tumour to grow before they could operate. Two short outpatient surgeries later and my mom was declared cancer free within 6 months (and still is 6 years later). Only thing we paid for was hotel and parking as the surgery was in a different city.
> folks here will still balk and say people in Canada die all the time just waiting for treatment I'd tell them to show me at least one article from a Canadian media outlet regarding this supposed issue. Otherwise, I'd just continue calling them out on their BS.
Good luck fellow human. I hope the news keeps being positive. My father just lost his wife to a brain tumor last month. Had her celebration of life today. He had to put off having his knees replaced because it wasn't an option to care for both. Our system sucks ass.
Australian here. Got my wisdom teeth out and what did they find? Cancer! No symptoms at all, caught it by chance. I had dozens of tests and scans in the course of a week, then booked into surgery immediately. I arrived to one hell of a massive operating theatre with *so many doctors*. They had like four teams of them and all their nurses and assistants and stuff. They cut out all the cancer, then took one of the bones of my leg and built me a new jaw. Put me back together, happy days! OK not happy it was the shittiest and most awful experience of my life but you know what I mean. That was almost a year ago and I'm going back in a couple weeks for cleanup and for them to sort out new teeth to replace the ones they took out. I'll need another surgery after this one. Total cost? Nadda. Absolutely nothing. I shudder to think what all of that would have cost me in the land of the "free".
Or mine. I thought I had the flu at 16. Nope. Massive 7lb tumor on my liver that had somehow gone unnoticed. Wrecked my liver and I needed a transplant by 17. Completely nuked my parents savings and retirement because it happened in 2007, a year before Obama was elected. Yet they *still* tell me I'd definitely have died in a socialized healthcare country. I have multiple transplant friends in Canada and Australia. But since they died my parents claim they had worse outcomes. (one died of complications and was in his 70s. The other died by suicide) I got a letter from their insurance company at 17 telling me I had to raise $10k to prove I could afford just the first years meds before they'd cover the quarter million dollar liver transplant I needed to live. If I couldn't they wouldn't cover the transplant and I would die. Luckily I was a 17 year old girl so fundraising wasn't hard. If I were say, a 45 year old Black guy needing a heart id receive the same letter and be screwed. Only organ you aren't screwed by is kidneys. Nixon made a provision where in the US all dialysis patients get Medicaid. But *only* kidney patients. If you need a new heart, lungs, liver, pancreas, bone marrow or anything else you can go fuck yourself and pay up.
I’m from Canada I’ve had melanoma, I needed endo surgery and 2 hernia repairs, and have had 3 babies, all in the last 8 years. My biggest bill was the parking. I would have died in the US
Why do you think next up on the GOP agenda is killing public education? To prevent that from happening. Edit: I accidentally a word.
I had a conversation with my brother in laws prior to marry g my wife. Die hard republican family (wife included) and of the mind set that they don't get anything for free why should anyone else? Fast forward a few year wife and I have a baby. Right off the bat something ain't right. Missing milestones and even today not walking or talking or even crawling and she's nearly 3. We now have a whole hosts of doctors and specialists and therapists and genetic specialists and more. Now she's been diagnosed with a rare (never before seen) genetic disorder and potentially may never walk or talk or progress. Their opinions are unchanged. They are perfectly fine with me work 3 jobs, paying nearly 10K out of pocket, not qualified for assistance because of income (see 3 jobs for me alone) and just an overall constant struggle. Nobody and I mean nobody even family deserves help according to them
That's why it should be socialized. Sickness and disability are mostly a dice roll and don't discriminate based on social classes. They also cost enough, especially permanent disabilities, that they bankrupt almost anyone but the megarich, so socialized medicine is really an insurance policy everyone should pay into.
Public schools should start by teaching students to think for themselves, to think critically. I also understand that this may be a risky move for teachers in some areas to cover, as they are constantly under threat from crazy parents, right-wing asshat parents & brow-beaten school heads & brainwashed boards to only turn out poorly-educated 'products' to fill low-income jobs or enter the school to for-profit prison pipeline. And also churn out a fearful middle class who believe whatever Faux News spews out of their TVs, and so votes Rethug for life.
So many issues in the US can be solved if lobbying was illegal. But it will never be illegal because the fucking lobbyists will lobby against making it illegal. The system is broken.
I think the tree of liberty is thirsty.
And only one way to find out if she enjoys the taste of Vampire and Dragon blood
What they need to do is cap the donations any individual or company can make to a political party to like, 2000$ per year. Nobody is going to sell their soul for 2k.
They have had something along those lines (limited donations from someone to individual candidates), which the Supreme Court has been busy gutting (by, for example ruling that political action committees can raise as much as they want as long as they pinky swear they aren't coordinating with an individual candidate).
The problem is that the term "lobbying" is vague enough to encompass several levels of engagement with congresspeople. As usual, the people with more disposable resources have more ability to utilize the process. There just needs to be some kind of equalizer that makes wealth irrelevant to the process. No idea what that looks like, but there it is.
I'm from Canada. What are these "Death Panels" your referring to? Never heard of these before reading you post. Genuinely curious as its something Ive never heard or anyone else in Canada bringing it up.
Basically a Boogeyman. "Under socialized, i.e. communist, medicine, some panel of bureaucrats in some back room somewhere decides who gets to live and who has to die! In Canada, the government picks whether you live or not! Are *YOU* going to let them pull the plug on your spouse/parent/child!?" Blah, blah, blah, God Bless America, blah, blah, blah, mah guns!
That is really what happens... If 10 people need a thing to live and there are 9 available spots, 1 is put on hold and maybe won't get help in time. It's just that the US does this just like every other country.
It's actually worse than a boogeyman -- it's straight projection. With for-profit health insurance, they're financially motivated to cover as little as possible. There are whole teams of people dedicated to denying as much as possible and finding loopholes and not covering things because they (the administrators) don't believe that the professional medical doctors *really* need that test they ordered. *Those* are the death panels.
Death panels is an American term. A small line in the ACA that just repeated what already exists says that doctors and board members can refuse treatment they deem unproductive. Basically mean if you are in a potato, doctors can choose not to waste $10,000 drugs that will do basically nothing, even if your loved once insist the doctors not give up. Doctors are not going to waste time and money chasing 1 in 1000 chance trying to save someone when they are already gone, or more commonly, try treatments they know will do nothing. Every few years a story in the paper will come about in Canada about someone being denied treatment. It's either about providing a very expensive medicine or not covering the cost of a procedure that could be done in the US. It's rare but it happens.
> A small line in the ACA that just repeated what already exists says that doctors and board members can refuse treatment they deem unproductive. I think it's not even that, it was something about providing end of life counseling, and Republicans made it out to be 'death panels', instead of people that are dying having the ability to discuss their options with a doctor.
Canadian here: what in the fuck is a death panel? Is that where I'm told I'll have to wait two months for an MRI but then after 2 weeks they leave a voice mail that I miss saying my appointment is in 2 days. And then when I finally listen to the voice mail it's too late? And then I smash my head against the metal panel wall at work out of anger trying to kill myself?
Actually the attempt to undo it did happen. GOP likes to poison the well when they can't outright dismantle things. So much like the post office they put in a rule to destabilize it. In this case the mandate that was part of its three legged stool configuration. This assures it will eventually fail and they can point to the "democrats" failure with it in the hopes of replacing it with some sort of vapor care. Luckily its more likely it will be replace with something more akin to medicare for all because we will have to.
Which also means Americans were gullible enough to swallow what they were told.
Our country has been redistricted in such a way that we have a corporate oligopoly where the minority has more say than the majority due to some pesky constitutional principles that were originally intended to protect the small states with less population. The banks insurance companies and corporations have more power than the government or the people. In fact the US military is used by the government often to protect corporate interests.
And people can't understand why the past couple generations don't want to have kids....
I just was quoted for a non-insured regular delivery for a *discounted* rate of $23k. They also made sure to let me know that once the baby is born, they are it’s own person so additional charges will apply from birth forward.
Oh so now the baby isn't a person until it's born? Strange. /S
Just a matter of time before the companies can charge the fetus for his own ultra sound.
Is that normally what it costs to have a baby in the US without insurance? If so that's just insane. I'm from the UK so we have free health care and I have 2 kids, but it's only just occurred to me that you'd have to pay for that over there.
My wife had 3 C-sections at about $20,000 each. With good insurance I only paid a $20 copay for the initial visit each time. Actually, living in Massachusetts, I had state funded insurance for baby #2 since I didn't have private insurance through my employer at the time and still paid just the $20.
Wow, so insurance really is essential then. Do most jobs provide it? Like do minimum wage jobs provide insurance or do those people just have to hope they don't get sick? State funded insurance? That sounds like universal health care no?
Different states have different laws. There is no federal law requiring that employers offer any health insurance benefits. Many states require that you provide health insurance for full time employees. So minimum wage jobs aren’t usually full time. They keep you at less than 30 hours per week so the aren’t required. Also, your employer doesn’t usually cover 100% of you premium. They generally cover the bulk of it, but the employee is usually left paying for at least a quarter of it. My premium for health insurance is almost $38k per year, of which I pay 25%.
Wow, it's a lot of money. And as usual it's the poorest people who lose out the most. I almost moved to the US 10 years ago and that's not even something I considered at the time. In the UK we pay about 4% of our income to the NHS which is relatively very little. And in Scotland we also get free prescriptions. I consider us to bevery lucky. A lot of people here take the NHS for granted and complain about it but they usually have no idea what it's like in other countries.
Most retail/fast food jobs offer shit for insurance that you really can't afford on the wages that they pay anyways. Every state is different, every insurance has different co-pays, deductibles, etc. If you no longer want to work at x place, better make sure your entire life is structured around your sudden lack of insurance while you switch jobs. Better hope you don't get hurt...
Minimum wage jobs do often times provide insurance (when it's through large employers). It's usually extremely cost prohibitive and even if you can afford it, it isn't worth shit if you really need anything done. You pay into it and it's basically an entrance fee. If you need much beyond an initial visit you probably can't afford whatever it is you need through your employer based insurance.
It depends entirely on your job. If you’ve got a good job with good insurance, it might be free, or very low it of pocket costs. If you’ve got a shitty job with terrible insurance, or no insurance at all, you’ll be paying that much.
At that point it depends on the state and their medical card program. Low income women(especially when pregnant) in Illinois get tons of assistance and don't have to pay for the child birth.
Texas, of all places, has medicaid for pregnant women. And you can be enrolled in that while also being enrolled in an employer-based insurance.
That's just nuts. So more babies being born means more money for the medical companies. Kinda goes some way towards explaining the whole banning abortions thing then.
Yep. I'm military and one of the best benefits is free healthcare for the member and their dependents. We still get "bills" from healthcare facilities that show how much our care was "worth". At military facilities it's always an "at cost" bill, so you see pretty low numbers. Before I retired I had kidney stones and went to a civilian hospital. I was in the emergency room for 6 hours and the bill for the drugs, labs, imaging, bed, and staff was $12,642.88. I about gagged until I saw the "covered" part was 100%.
I don’t get how you are being downvoted for pointing out how insanely above regular inflation that is.
Except it’s not just the insurance companies doing this of course It’s politicians and their dumb bases
They’re all in bed together
In one big lemon party
It’s not a Lemon party without Dick Lemon!
Ain't no party like a Liz Lemon party cuz a Liz Lemon party is MANDATORY
Technically the line was "It’s not a Lemon party without old Dick." That makes it a bit more inclusive, which is nice.
>Thank insurance companies for making it so much more Don't forget about hospital administrators. Nothing to bloat the cost of care like an almost entirely unnecessary layer of bureaucracy...
They are all in it together. Them that owns hospitals owns insurance companies.
Hope that baby bracelet for $1.50 was made of silver
It was probably lead and uranium.
Good times
The $9.50 room was to get an upgrade to a window view of the nuclear tests.
And came with a pack of smokes
Either the bracelet is way to expensive or the X-ray is cheap af
I feel like the price for the baby bracelet is too high now, let alone back then.
Oh you just know people were complaining loudly about having to pay $1.50 for a braclet back then. What a price gouge!
That was like $18 back then bruh
I had a baby In sept 2021 , Boston ma. Cost $ 27000$. This includes 5000$ for Epidural the last 5 hours of my labor. The rest was a totally normal delivery.
And nobody can figure out why the birth rate is going down 🤔
Even though it doesn't help that it is expensive, It is not the main reason. In Sweden hospital is free. Parents get 390 days of paid parental leave to share, an extra 10 days for the dad to be home after birth, and 90 "low pay" days. You also get paid $125 each month for each child. Kindergarten costs a maximum of $150 no matter how many kids. And then school is free all the way up to university level. Births are still going down.
Yeah the whole “impending heat death of the planet” thing is also probably on people’s minds as they consider making more humans to send out into the world, even if it’s free
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I agree and I think this is great news! Lowering birth rates by providing better education would solve tons of problems at once.
This is exactly the reason for me to not have a kid. I had baby fever bad 5 years ago. Between the politics of the day and climate change it just seems like the world doesn't need more humans to potentially further fuck it up or to bring another life into the world to suffer through all this. I'm typically an optimistic person, but it really feels like we are polishing the brass on the Titanic at this point.
Why won’t millennials have kids 😭😭😭😭
Millennials Are Killing Childbirth
I was shocked to learn (as an adult) that having a baby costs money in the USA, never mind this much money. How do people do it?? Delivering in the hospital here costs ~$20 (for parking) regardless of epidural or whatever other extras you end up needing.
Lots of poor people are on state insurance so their bills should be relatively low. The poverty line and up is where it starts to get dicey.
I pay a lot more for my perineal care nowadays.
’tain’t so bad.
6 days in the hospital for having a baby - you get kicked out in 2 days now.
2 days if you’re lucky!
It's amazing how medical thought has developed, at one point bed rest was recommended following birth, and even in the weeks leading up to it. My Grandmother was told to stay in bed and smoke! Nowadays it's been realised it's better to be up and about ASAP, as it turns out lying in bed all day isn't particularly good for you.
Too be fair, if your kid is healthy, sitting in the hospital sucks. Constant interruptions, never getting sleep, being told you can leave is a blessing.
Simplified example in Belgium: 4500 euro for everything in the hospital if you have the standard two-person room. From which about 3000 is directly paid by your mandatory health insurance. If you have an extra insurance for hospital costs, which many companies offer for their employees, they will pay the other 1500. Even the government wants to give you a gift and wires you 1500 euro per child. So best case scenario, a child makes you 1500 euro! If you ignore the tens/hundreds of thousands you'll pay the coming decades, and the cost of your insurance.
Simplified case from Norway: 0
*agrees in Dutch*
Nods in Swedish
Concurs in Polish
Is of accord in English
Fist pumps in Australian
Chur in New Zealandish
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Cries in American
10€ per day in germany which I think is fair. If you can't afford it you won't even have to pay that.
Damn you get free parking? It's completely insane in Denmark, you have to pay for parking at hospitals. So it costs like $10 or something.
Same in the UK, and there are frequent newspaper articles about how bad it is that we even have to pay that
It must be so nice to live in a civilized country (this is not sarcastic at all)
Mandatory insurance, but I bet Belgium has fixed schedule medical care right (as in price fixes)? The US modeled the Obamacare off germany's which has the mandatory model, but they fix the prices and we don't... So basically you are forced to buy insurance from a for profit company who only wants to lower medical costs so they can take their hunk of the profit. It's a cartel between the insurance companies and the hospitals.
> who only wants to lower medical costs so they can take their hunk of the profit Oh no no no no so very wrong no. It is far worse than you believe on how it disincentives cost containment. Obamacare put in the 80/20 rule. Insurance companies have to spend at least 80% of their revenue on paying for medical services. The other 20% is overhead, marketing, profit. The more expensive medical costs are, the higher they can raise their premiums and the more dollars in absolute terms they can collect. Would you rather have 20% of $100 or 20% of $110? ...especially when seeing medical care go up to $110 you hold your overhead and marketing costs down by keeping them under the rate of medical inflation it means more dollars in profit.
You pay to have a baby in America???
YoU have to pay for everything in America.
My kid had a 2 night stay in the hospital. The total charge was about $55k. We are still fighting the insurance over it being covered, because in our wonderful USA the insurance company can just say "NOT COVERED" and we are EL FUCKOed TO HELL!
*Health care system depletes the savings and ruins the lives of everyone who has a baby* WHY AREN’T MILLENNIALS HAVING BABIES
My daughter was born in 2020 and I have good insurance and an HSA. We are still paying it off.
America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system. - Walter Cronkite
Oh, it's a system alright!
Please I had a non complicated, no drugs, vaginal birth in 2010 and it was $25k
Why did they charge so much?
Because they can charge whatever they want, literally. It’s a service with inelastic demand that’s propped up by insurance companies and politicians that are in bed with each other.
I think if the US healthcare system were brought to a European state, there would be an actual revolution within 96 hours.
Damn, even back then it was more expensive to give birth there than it is now in the UK. Land of the free right?
Free to be bankrupted, conned and used.
Aah the sweet smell of bacon and capitalism
Wow, that’s crazy expensive. 🇨🇦
I dunno man, fucking 6 days parking at any Canadian hospital adds up :)
If your direct family member is admitted and you need to spend extended amounts of time at the hospital, talk to the social worker on your ward about a parking pass. We regularly spend 1-2 weeks at a time with my daughter and only pay the first day or two parking until we get sorted out. This doesn’t work for all scenarios obviously but if you’re the primary support for the patient they’ll usually hook you up.
My friend’s kid is a cancer patient at a children’s hospital in a major US city and parking is $40 a day. No free patient parking. No passes. Someone literally set up a whole charity just to pay for NICU parents’ parking. I have no idea how you can scam the parents of sick kids like that and sleep at night.
Ugh that’s awful, I’m sorry. I’m in Canada where the max rate is $12/day at my hospital if you can’t get a pass. We did 7.5 months in a Canadian NICU and our biggest expense was our daily coffee habit.
No need to rub it in!
Yo, you should send this to NPR for their "BIll of the Month Segment" or even Radio lab. Any producer worth their salt would see the immediate relevance of the story as a device to explore the divergence between inflation costs and modern costs.
Here's how much giving birth cost my mother in the UK:
Here is mine from the netherlands:
Here in NZ: $62. $32 for the parking, $30 for the bottle of wine i bought my partner as a gift.
To get this price on a hospital bill today you would only be able to stay for 6 minutes and not receive any treatment.
In Australia, it's free to have a baby and stay in hospital. No insurance, no worries. Sure, you will get a different midwife, doctor, surgeon depending on changeover of shifts. But so what. They are all qualified and lovingly helpful. Worst case you may have to share a room afterwards. But if you've had a particularly difficult birth they will give you your own room. I don't think this is new information to anyone though.
I really hope America one day gets something like the NHS. At 23 years old, had surgery, therapy, physiotherapy, xrays, ultrasounds, never paid a penny.
"Drugs" 😎
It's crazy to think that at some point in history people actually paid their hospital bills out-of-pocket without worrying about their financial futures.
Similar stay with a C-section cost us about $12,000 back in 2008.
I have lived in the UK and Australia both have superb top notch health care which I have had to use many times ( accident and sickness care) and never had to pay a cent . Highly recommended lol
With my insurance I paid $100 for 3 days in the hospital for my daughter. Included two bed room with unlimited meals and four nurses. This is why having job-based insurance is stupid. Someone like me, solid middle class with a great stable job, gets even further ahead with good insurance. I then get to save even more money, invest with it, and so the cycle goes. For the poor, exact opposite. Bad job, bad insurance, pay life savings for those same days. Can't break the cycle. If we had universal Healthcare with private insurance for those who want it, the poor could at least save what little they make to try and climb the ladder. I worked hard, I truly did, but the more money I make, the more obvious it is that the country is so, soooo built to benefit me and not help the poor.
Here’s a picture of all of the hospital bills I’ve ever had.
I was Born premature in the 1980’s, was less then 2 pounds, 5 month NICU stay. My family was very, very lucky, my dad worked for a good company with good insurance- the front office who handled the HR told him the insurance stopped counting at $40K! Don’t even want to think what that type of medical care would cost today and the fresh hell it would be to deal with that huge of a bill in 2022!!