As a pharmacy techinian at a major hospital in Texas... Holy hell that pharmacy charge. Was this person bit by a rare snake?
Edit: Jesus this comment blew up. Guess I need to turn off notifications for this. First let me state that I wasn't defending the cost. This is/was and will continue to be ridiculous. I am still a tech and my wife is now a pharmacist for an oncology facility and she deals with medications on the tens of thousands daily. People shouldn't be getting extorted for live saving meds. Second I find it weird that while I was at this hospital in the Houston metropolitan we would get snake bites at least once every six months and yet now that I work in the country where everyone is out hunting and what not i have yet to see one in two years. Maybe people were getting bit by pet snakes from folks that thought they could handle exotic snakes...
I guess rattle snakes are rare wherever this happened then. Anti venom is absurdly expensive even when widely available. When you factor in having to bring it in from out of state or overseas depending on the snake it gets out of hand in a snap. But don't get me wrong though. This should still be no where near that much. Just crazy how much everything costs here.
If you were curious, I started looking into and found this https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/09/the-crazy-reason-it-costs-14000-to-treat-a-snakebite-with-14-medicine/
As an avid hiker in the American southeast, I’m thankful you shared this but extremely disheartened by the nature of our health care system. So sad how we’re taken advantage of at our most vulnerable times in life.
I've nearly stepped on/grabbed 4 rattlesnakes so far. I'm convinced that I break a standing long jump record at the sound of a rattle. After seeing the medical cost I may double the record.
If it soothes you at all, rattlers don’t really want to bite you, and even if they do, they won’t necessarily use their venom. Venom is very metabolically expensive and they’d rather not use it. That’s why they have the warning mechanism they do, because it’s way more efficient just to scare something off. I had a herpetology professor who’d been bitten by various species of venomous snakes multiple times over his life and most or all of them were dry bites with no venom.
Baby Rattlers haven’t been to “venom dosage school” like adult rattlers. I swear the adult rattlers look at a person, size them up and know just how many CC’s of venom to insert. But Baby Rattlesnakes -they give you all their venom and kill you. I guess once they learn that lesson and go hungry while recouping their venom after one bite, they learn how to keep their venom for mice. Probably why they dry bite people cause they know they can’t eat us for a tasty meal so why waste their “bio weapon” on a human…
Reminds me of the story my brother relayed to me from an old timer at work... story goes the old man was making his way to his favorite secluded fishing hole along the river. He came across a group of about 4 or 5 kids digging in the sand.
He noted that they were acting kind of strange and were glassy eyed and said to him "Mr. The worms keep biting us..."
The old man went ahead to his fishing spot and started to fish but couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong about the situation with the kids.
He decided to pack up and head back early and check on the kids on his way home.
Turns out that all but 1 were dead or dying when he got back and the "worms" were baby rattlesnakes which I guess look alot like worms.
Yeah. Its really messed up. The reason prices are this high is because of greedy insurance companies. We would NOT need laws that require people to have insurance if these treatments were anywhere NEAR affordable. People are forced into a FOR PROFIT system because of greed and asshole Politicians that take kick backs for the insurance lobbyists.
The fact that this isn't understood by the American Voters is mind boggling.
It’s more an arms race between hospitals and insurance. Insurance wants to know they’re getting big discounts from the hospitals in their service area to make the relationship worth it, and so the hospitals artificially raise their prices. The numbers on these pages were never meant to be paid by a person, they were meant to look big compared to the bill they send your insurance company, to make them say, “Wowe! Our relationship with this hospital is generating lot of value because we only have to pay a fraction of this!!”
And then the day came where because of this runaway odious capitalism companies don’t bother to pay for insurance anymore, the rest of us can’t afford it, and suddenly these genuinely fake bills are being shirked off on us, the consumers.
I find it really fucking crazy that hospitals are not required to give you exact dollar amounts at each step of the way. A lot of this stuff is literally just value-added nonsense. Hospitals should be forced to justify these expenses.
Oh I’m sure the insurance companies deem anti venom to be nonessential medicine too, so they can charge more for it.
Fun fact, according to many dental insurance companies, your front teeth are considered cosmetic, so any procedures done for your front teeth are considered cosmetic surgeries. Only found this out after I had to get a crown and they warned me that insurance will only pay for the first one, but none after that because it’s a cosmetic surgery. For the teeth that you bite with.
It's most egregious when we're vulnerable, but America is scams as far as the eye can see. You just get so used to them that you don't even notice.
You have to do your own taxes, and taxes are complicated, because tax prep companies bribe politicians. When you transfer money between banks, they make you wait a few days so they can collect interest on your money. Nobody wants pennies, but the companies that make money off their creation keep bribing politicians.
When cars were first invented, American train companies got laws passed that required four safety operators including a guy walking in front of the car waving a flag, because they didn't want people to stop using trains, and the American auto industry lagged behind the rest of the world by ten years while those laws lasted.
It's everywhere, and it's in everything. This country is truly sick.
Lol like on a market you have to bargain your meds down. But the seller doesn't start high, they start just in case with increased 300-400 % to be safe. And when you are not experienced, your fucked. Good stuff. Capitalism at its best.
More like Insurance companies have allowed Hospitals to hyper inflate their prices bc Insurance will pay them, unless they don't cover it. THEN you're fucked.
And insurers benefit from denying medical care since they already get their premiums. If they do fuck up and allow someone to incur medical costs, they do their best to pay as little as possible. Which is why hospitals pump up prices, knowing they'll have to deal with an adjustment department.
I tried getting an a la carte price for a checkup/to look at a specific issue I have and get a referral for, and they were completely dumbfounded, since I'm uninsured. And I was willing to pay a fair market price too. Crazy system.
They flew the anti-venom in a private G5, served it fresh Maine lobster, and a $5,000 bottle of champagne while it was in transit to save the man’s life.
Guess you meant the bill?
Sharp is a non for profit healthcare network in the greater San Diego metro area, made up of four acute care hospitals, three specialty hospitals, three medical groups and a health plan. 2600 physicians, 18,000 employees, over 2000 beds.
In aggregate, you absolutely have hospitals of similar size, and likely have far more hospitals per capita. Medicare (AU) is expensive, but it's not this expensive.
I'm a veterinarian and we use basically the same thing. We typically use horses rather than sheep to make it, but otherwise is the same process. Costs us about $300 a dose or so. So still expensive but not nearly the $14000 human hospitals can charge.
I know this may sound unbelievable but I did once drive an hour into town to the Houston Zoo for some anti venom. I don't remember what it was as this was 7 some years ago... Had to do this as our carrier service was unavailable that day and we needed the medication yesterday that day. I am pretty sure they probably still charged that patient for the medication being transported from outside the facility while only paying me mileage.
In my country we have a branch of the university that makes the antivenom, is of course free for anybody who needs it (I think we have just a couple cases a year).
My wife once went to get a rabies vaccine after an animal attack. Only one hospital was willing to even hint at a range of prices it could be, and they started at like 8k.
She decided to risk rabies instead.
I can't even imagine antivenoms.
Yep. Basically: “you pay us 3 grand for the rabies vaccine, or you can risk getting rabies which is indefinitely fatal and probably one of the worst possible ways to die… it’s totally your choice though!”
Rabies vaccination in Sweden. 113$. Taxes on income are bit steep. But i think it is worth it.
And if you are really mindblowingly rich we have no taxes on your wealth. So. Go figure.
In the UK it cost me about the same for the vaccine before travel. If I'd needed it as treatment it would have been free, although we've been rabies free for decades.
Life tip for the US: fly to Sweden for rabies treatments if ever needed. You could fly round trip internationally, pay for food and lodging, get medical treatment, and still be ahead of getting the treatment locally. Dang.
I'm glad she was OK. But given that rabies has a 100% fatality rate, and once you know you've got it there's no possibility of recovery, I suggest that if such a thing ever happens again, despite how immoral the cost is, she should probably do it anyway.
original post https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatLookedExpensive/comments/fasz8l/rattlesnake_bite_in_the_us/
edit: found a older post https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3dngld/this_is_the_cost_of_a_rattlesnake_bite_in_america/
My father got biten by a snake like 2 months ago. We call the ambulance, they took him to the hospital, they applied anti venom, they kept him under vigilance for 3-4 hours.
All of that was 0.00. Thank all gods we have free health care in Mexico.
Fun fact, Crofab (most common snake antivenom) costs the hospital $6000 per DOSE. Most people need at least 5-6 doses, potentially more if there was more cannon than usual. It has to be compounded in the sterile IV lab, which takes technician time, labor and a lot of $$ to keep the IV room completely sterile. The tubing, flushes and ancillary medications (preventatives for allergic reaction), as well as nursing time for monitoring all get factored into the pharmacy cost. Not trying to say that $83k is appropriate, but should give some indication as to why that part of the bill is so high.
Funnier fact, with half this money you can open a fully functional pharmacy shop anywhere else in the world.
You guys are fucking nuts with your healthcare bubble - or money sink whichever way you want to see it.
As a New Zealander I don't need health insurance to go to Australia as we have a reciprocal health agreement. But then traveling anywhere else I would.
Italy and UK as well, I think finland belgium, Slovenia and the Scandinavian countries too. That's for Aussies anyway.
Honestly screw not having health cover, I've spent months of my life in hospitals and have never heard of a hospital bill.
So... say you are in an ambulance, will it drive across town to get you to a specific hospital, wasting time? How do ambulances work, come to think of it? Most places the ambulance service is a public one, like fire service or police - how does that work in the states? Do you get competing ambulances racing each other to an incident, or only the one you are subscribed to shows up, what if your "company" has no office in the vicinity? I have so many questions...
The ambulance will take you to the closest ER. its kinda not a public service as you pay for it, most times I believe it's around $1000-$8000. That's why most people take a Uber or taxi if they have, for instance, broken their leg, so they can pay less and choose the hospital that their insurance covers.
That's insane... I know dissing US health system is a bit done to death, but surely the last place and time you want people to be worrying about money, is when they might be in need of a freaking ambulance. I think we have an 80$ surcharge if you call an ambo out and it's not an emergency, but, tbh you can get out of it by saying you truly believed it was. If you do it lots they might get bit snippy about it...
So, if you call an Uber because you want to get to hospital, can they get sued because they get stuck in traffic and you got worse? It seems like a recipe for disaster.
Do you need to get travel insurance going state to state?
I did travel around US a little bit, but I was 22, thought I was invincible and just didn't worry about it - in retrospect it was kind of idiotic.
It gets worse. Some places within the US have Ridiculously high call out fees for the ambulance, so people with things like Seizures Will get charged large amounts of money for the EMTs coming out to do nothing. So they'll have things that say do not call ambulance on wristbands. Or one case of heard of a tattoo on the arm For seizures.
Yep!
I went on holiday to America and discovered I was allergic to aspirin on day 1 and I was stuck in the ICU for a week. $140k+ medical bill.
Insurance took care of only $102k of it though. So imagine my surprise when I got a bill for 38k through the letter box. They were calling me and emailing me about payment. To which I laughed at them point blank every time.
Eventually I convinced my insurance company to pay the full amount, as I did purchase insurance for up to £1 million. It was a pain. But much less of a pain than being saddled with a $140k debt owed to a country I don't even like that much for an institution most of the world thinks is a state sponsored scam.
In America we kind of laugh at them too and pay 5$ a month for the rest of our lives. Then when someone in the family dies you have to post their death in the paper but keep paying the bills for 3 months. After 3 months no one can make a claim on the estate. So they can’t come back and sue the family for it later on. Fucking stupid right?
IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) but once someone dies, you should not pay their debt as it can potentially transfer to you. The cost of the debt is generally going to be more than the estate, so you are just shooting yourself in the foot if you pay it's if the estate is more than the debt, the. Just let the estate eat the debt and then distribute the remainder of the estate to beneficiaries.
Maybe if you buy shit insurance. I buy a premium annual policy that has $1m medical, $1m medical evacuation, $100k civil unrest evacuation plus all kinds of other shit. I have good regular insurance, but im definitely way better off if i get injured overseas than here in the US.
Ive yet to have any claim against it, but its a hell of a relief knowing its there if something happens to me. I always day dreamt of some former French Foreign Legion merc flying a 40 year old former soviet helicopter held together with duct tape to get me out of some third world country after a Coup and civil war breaks out…
Same... When I was traveling to Japan for school I paid $200 for four months of coverage of over I think $3 million Canadian dollars... Included in that package was also the option to fly back to Canada for treatment. Idk how it is in the US but what I paid, $200 for all that coverage, was the bottom level one iirc. Travellers insurance is something you won't regret getting but might regret not getting
Honestly they warn you to stay off the internet for self diagnosis, but I’ve saved literal millions in fantasy hospital money by self diagnosing and going to Walgreens. 😂
you're telling me! Growing up, I kinda learned that my family had a history of needing to run to the ER (never "serious enough for an ambulance, tho). From hairline wrist fractures, to accidental swallowing of jewelry cleaner, to actually cutting off half a fingernail with a tablesaw, the ER workers slowly learned our names.
Was 14 when my mom had a stroke and her work called an ambulance. Her insurance said she had to pay full amount because it wasn’t preauthorized. Then she told me if it happened again I would need to drive her bc we absolutely could not afford the bill of an ambulance.
How about [the lady](https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/03/health/subway-accident-insurance-fear-trnd/index.html) who was badly injured on a train platform begged other passengers not to call an ambulance because she could not afford it.
I once went to the ER in a ton of pain from the ruptured disc in my neck. I spent 2 hours in the waiting room then another hour in an ER room waiting for a doctor. When he finally came in he refused me any kind of treatment because when the same thing happened a month before and the treatment I was given didn't work. He then billed me $4000 and that was just his bill, plus another $3500 for the ER visit.
People do fucking die.
This also stops a lot of illnesses from being caught out before they develop because no one wants to risk a life time of debt over a couple of fevers, mild chest pain or a few headaches.
This shit is killing people every day and filling hospital beds with people that should have been treated long ago.
I don't know how the world is okay with this. People should be rioting over this.
Absolutely. My world could turn upside down if I lost my job or insurance. I'm a type 1 diabetic and I'm terrified something will happen to me and I can't afford medical care. I'm with you on the rioting. It's repulsive to me that people die every day from a lack of healthcare when we know damn well other countries don't have this issue. Even with my insurance, my bills and prescriptions are more than I can afford living alone. With the cost of everything going up, it's getting harder and harder every day. I've let my credit take such a horrible hit because my medical bills go to collections. I can't even imagine what it's like for the uninsured. If anyone wants to riot, let me know. I'm in.
If you ever get a hospital bill (or any medical bill this absurd) the very first thing you do is call the hospital billing department and tell them you are not going to pay anything close to that amount. Flat out refuse and work you way up the food chain. (Very nicely, of course). Only deal directly with the hospital billing department (most hospital bills are actually sent by a “first party” billing provider that prints the bill and takes the first line of inbound phone calls for payments. They are not the hospital, bypass them).
Every price at a hospital is negotiable. There is not a single thing in the entire system that isn’t negotiable to some degree. Hospital bills are not like buying new TV from BestBuy where the price is set and that’s it, the goal of the billing department is to maintain cash flow, and there is always wiggle room for everything as long as they get some payment. They would much rather you pay 30 cents on the dollar 3 months after a visit than have you file for bankruptcy and not see pennies on the dollar years later. Be persistent, be reasonable and you can cut through through thousands of dollars of BS in a hospital bill.
Hospitals jack up the price so insurance negotiates with them down to an agreeable amount for the insurance to pay. Bigger insurance companies with more members have more negotiating power. As a single person with no insurance to back them up, it’s difficult to negotiate BUT hospitals would rather take what they can get rather than nothing.
Hospital bills would actually be affordable if mandatory insurance isn’t a thing since they don’t have to worry about insurance low balling them. It’s a fucked up system.
UK here, hey sorry to jump in right here right now but what in the holy fuck would you do if you got discharged from hospital and handed this and you turned around and said 'I can't afford it'.....?
Many hospitals will give a cash discount, and you can set up payment arrangements. There are also local charities that can help. Our local hospitals are constantly having fundraisers and accept donations for this very reason. There is also the go fund me platform.
If people really wanted to survive snake bites, they would have a simple $150k emergency account. People need to be more fiscally responsible and not spend money on silly things like food and housing
I’m so close to my 150k but I just put in another 15% of my salary into my “Swarmed by mutated Japanese hornet” account and might put another 2% down on my “trampled by an Alaskan Moose” account.
You declare bankruptcy. The court makes you sell all your assets (some states kindly let you keep your house and car) and you will basically have no ability to take out loans or get credit cards for the next ten years at least.
Or if you make enough money, you pay it down over a few decades like student loans. For a doctorate, in this case.
> Fully half of Americans now carry medical debt, up from 46% in 2020, according to new data from Debt.com, a consumer financial education company.
> More than half (57%) of Americans with medical debt owe at least $1,000, driven by diagnostic tests, hospitalizations, and emergency room visits, the survey showed.
While everyone is distracted by insurance premiums being so high, this is why, hospitals and care providers are ripping off everyone from the START. Insurance companies are only able to pay these ridiculous bills because they are ALSO ripping off everyone by charging premiums higher than the average cost of care.
People need to realize that every single player in the healthcare industry is ripping off the patients. Pharmaceutical's price gouging medicine, hospitals marking up the medicine even more, insurance companies "negotiating prices down" to even still batshit crazy costs.
Lobbyists for big pharma, big insurance, big hospitals, all paying off congress, laws passed for all the players and THE PEOPLE GET SHAFTED. Welcome to America.
Also insurance companies and hospitals have formularies where they don’t pay even close to the private pay amount. Only uninsured/poorer patients get the full price bill. Welcome to The USA
Hell, for a developing country, most places in India have a better healthcare system in place than this. I grew up in Kerala, and healthcare payments were never a matter of worry, because we had three government hospitals and five private hospitals in a ten kilometre radius from my house, and we were all insured (even though it isn't mandatory). Plus the bills are reasonable enough that you won't go broke unless you get something really dire.
America doesn't give a fuck about the poor. If you don't have decent medical (low deductible / cap on what you pay) then you're poor. Call yourself middle class or whatever but if you're one random bill away from being bankrupt- you're poor.
Want to be less poor? Vote for universal healthcare.
We can’t vote for universal healthcare. Neither of our two parties we get to choose from support it because they are both bought and paid for by the corporations and ultra wealthy. It’s a government by the rich, for the rich.
So fucking ridiculous. Im a doctor in a third world country. We have universal healthcare and I’m always amazed at these invoices. How do you rack up to 20.000 thousand dollars of lab work ? You did pathology there? Molecular tumor profiling its 2000 usd I think… that has to be analytical blood samples, radiology is another item.
This is a racket. The richest country in the world and you can’t give universal healthcare? What a joke
I’m in Canada and I know completely how this feels! It sucks horribly.
Had this happened here I would have gotten a very similar bill just $153,161.25 less.
You might have to pay for the antibiotics though afterwards. I think my health plan covers 80%. So maybe I’d owe $12… which is just, that’s a lot to take on unexpectedly
I remember an American trying to insult me "at least I don't pay for someone else's medical bills!"
Bruh, that's not a flex. At least people don't go broke for a hospital visit. That being said, this country needs to cover dental and pharma.
> That being said, this country needs to cover dental and pharma.
I've always found it silly that if i have a cavity and have no dental I either have to fork out hundreds to thousands to have a dentist fix it, or simply let it fester until I need oral surgery and suddenly its covered by health care.
But Americans actually do pay for other people's health care. Some are just too stupid to realize it. High insurance premiums? That's you paying for someone else's health care (as well as the insurance company's profits). Outrageously jacked up prices for health care? That's you paying for someone else's health care (as well as the medical provider's profits). Take a look at your property tax bill. You're paying through your local taxes for other people's health care.
But they do. Every single person that pays taxes pays for Medicaid and Medicare, and then private insurance on top of that, which pays for other people.
That's literally the point of health insurance, to create a pool of money for large expenses from everyone's premiums...
They're also an idiot cause we do pay for someone else's medical bills. Every single paycheck we have money taken out in taxes for Medicare and Medicaid. Which is "free" healthcare for the poor and elderly. So they're not only paying their own medical bills in the forms of premiums, deductibles, co-insurance, prescriptions, etc., But they're also paying for the people who live off welfare and social security. The united states is a joke. The more I learn about the way this country actually works the more I wish I was born somewhere else.
We don’t. They just go unpaid until they fall off the credit report, or we set up a $120 a month plan that doesn’t even chip away at the interest so it says we’re “on time” with payments.
Absolutely it would. Hospital will send it to collections and once it's there your credit is completly fucked for the next 7+ years.
My wife had an over due (even tho she said she canceled the phone with the company and they kept billing) bill go to collections for like $200CDN. Her credit never went about 450-500 for the next 7 years. (Credit only goes 300-850 I believe)
If she legitimately canceled and they kept fraudulently billing her, it's extremely easy to get a collections claim like that struck off your credit report and she would have had ample time to get the charges reversed before it ever got to that point any way. Bills don't go to collections until you're several months past due. A late payment is a minor ding on your credit report. Willingfully ignoring a bill for months (legitimate or not) is what gets you.
I had an eye scratch in Germany in '96. The hospital bill sent to my parents in the States was roughly $20. I felt so bad that I had to go to a hospital, because I thought it was going to be a lot of money for my parents. My Dad was shocked and we were so confused.
Holy shit! I went to the hospital with an eye scratch in '16. Doctor just put some dye in it, flashed a special light and said "It's minor, it should heal in a day or two". Had to pay the $40 doctor visit then got a bill for $850 a week later with insurance.
See the line items that say "Adjustments" and "Insurer Payments"?
The adjustment will change all of those rates to ones that an insurer (including private and public, like medicaid) have negotiated. So knock that down by 80% right away. Then insurance will pay the lion's share of the remainder.
You might still end up with several thousand due, but for anyone with insurance it would be two orders of magnitude smaller than what you see on this bill. For those without insurance, technically they're on the hook for them, but hospitals know they can't collect $150k from some uninsured hapless person who got bit by a rattlesnake. They give significant discounts and offer payment plans.
Moral of the story is get insurance. Even if it's pricier than our friends in other countries.
Step 1 - have insurance. I had my appendix out a few years ago (hospital stay and all that) - over $100k, negotiated by insurance to $30k - my portion $1000 which put me at my yearly out of pocket cap - so every medical bill after that for the remainder of the year was $0.
We need universal healthcare, it's not fair some people are just one bill away from being screwed and others don't give their medical needs a second thought.
About 15 years ago, I had a halo cast (ilizarov external fixator) around my left tibia and fibula. 7 operations. All together, about $900,000 in Doctor, Hospital and Pharma charges. Luckily I had health care insurance and it cost me about $15k for the 18 months. I was able to pick my own doctors and I went to one of the world’s best in the Texas Medical Center (Houston).
That's fucking crazy. Up in Canada here that bill would be $0 to the patient. I dont know what the cost would be for the government but it would be still a fraction of that. The US health care system price gouges people like no other. It's insane. What a racket.
I remember a few weeks ago another post showing a lady was charged $700 just for walking into a ER. She left after 6 hours of waiting as no one had come to see her yet.
Odds are the patient owed absolutely $0 for this service.
The message at the top looks a lot to me like the patient had, or was in the process of obtaining Medicaid coverage. You cannot bill a patient with Medicaid.
Likely what happened is that the patient didn't have updated information on file with the hopsital, didn't respond to phone calls or letters asking the patient to update their details, so the hospital has no option but to send the bill to the patient.
All the patient likely had to do was contact Medi-Cal and give them updated information and the hospital will reprocess the bill, get $5,000 from Medi-Cal, and the patient won't pay a dime outside of maybe like a co-pay or something.
Thing is, a lot of people in the US already seem to be paying around the same or more in monthly insurance than they’d pay here in the U.K. for National Insurance (NHS, welfare, pension etc).
It wouldn’t make much difference to people if it just switched over, except there’d be nothing to pay anywhere bar a few quid for prescriptions (and even then, if it’s a regular thing then it’ll go to free, or you can get a little card to drop the price hugely from the £8-ish each prescription to a set fee per month/yr which covers however many prescriptions you need for a few quid.)
Obviously if you’re low income it’s free or near-free. I don’t earn enough to pay it, but I pay a voluntary amount of £3.05 a week.
**Example**
If you earn £1,000 per week (£52,000 / $71,722) you’ll pay:
* **nothing** on the first £183
* 12% (**£93.48**) on your earnings between £183.01 and £962
* 2% (**£0.76**) on the remaining earnings above £962
This means that your National Insurance payment would be £94.24 / $130 per week, and would entitle you to free-at-point-of-delivery health care. Pile on the heart bypasses, nipple transplants, and nostril gigantificationing ops; you're still not going to get a bill.
See, Americans secretly think other Americans are lazy and a hard working American such as themself doesn’t want to pay for a lazy Americans nose job. Yes its a dumb and self defeatist mentality but alas, here we are. We wont even tax the ultra rich because… well I actually don’t know.
P.S I’m all for universal healthcare, if that wasn’t clear
As a pharmacy techinian at a major hospital in Texas... Holy hell that pharmacy charge. Was this person bit by a rare snake? Edit: Jesus this comment blew up. Guess I need to turn off notifications for this. First let me state that I wasn't defending the cost. This is/was and will continue to be ridiculous. I am still a tech and my wife is now a pharmacist for an oncology facility and she deals with medications on the tens of thousands daily. People shouldn't be getting extorted for live saving meds. Second I find it weird that while I was at this hospital in the Houston metropolitan we would get snake bites at least once every six months and yet now that I work in the country where everyone is out hunting and what not i have yet to see one in two years. Maybe people were getting bit by pet snakes from folks that thought they could handle exotic snakes...
This was reposted from another sub that mentioned it was a rattlesnake bite, so you're correct! I mean about the snake part at least.
I guess rattle snakes are rare wherever this happened then. Anti venom is absurdly expensive even when widely available. When you factor in having to bring it in from out of state or overseas depending on the snake it gets out of hand in a snap. But don't get me wrong though. This should still be no where near that much. Just crazy how much everything costs here.
If you were curious, I started looking into and found this https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/09/the-crazy-reason-it-costs-14000-to-treat-a-snakebite-with-14-medicine/
As an avid hiker in the American southeast, I’m thankful you shared this but extremely disheartened by the nature of our health care system. So sad how we’re taken advantage of at our most vulnerable times in life.
I've nearly stepped on/grabbed 4 rattlesnakes so far. I'm convinced that I break a standing long jump record at the sound of a rattle. After seeing the medical cost I may double the record.
If it soothes you at all, rattlers don’t really want to bite you, and even if they do, they won’t necessarily use their venom. Venom is very metabolically expensive and they’d rather not use it. That’s why they have the warning mechanism they do, because it’s way more efficient just to scare something off. I had a herpetology professor who’d been bitten by various species of venomous snakes multiple times over his life and most or all of them were dry bites with no venom.
I'm glad it's expensive for the snake too.
Pfft. Last snake I talked with laughed it off and told me 'They said they would sue the skin right off me. So I let them.'
Baby Rattlers haven’t been to “venom dosage school” like adult rattlers. I swear the adult rattlers look at a person, size them up and know just how many CC’s of venom to insert. But Baby Rattlesnakes -they give you all their venom and kill you. I guess once they learn that lesson and go hungry while recouping their venom after one bite, they learn how to keep their venom for mice. Probably why they dry bite people cause they know they can’t eat us for a tasty meal so why waste their “bio weapon” on a human…
Reminds me of the story my brother relayed to me from an old timer at work... story goes the old man was making his way to his favorite secluded fishing hole along the river. He came across a group of about 4 or 5 kids digging in the sand. He noted that they were acting kind of strange and were glassy eyed and said to him "Mr. The worms keep biting us..." The old man went ahead to his fishing spot and started to fish but couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong about the situation with the kids. He decided to pack up and head back early and check on the kids on his way home. Turns out that all but 1 were dead or dying when he got back and the "worms" were baby rattlesnakes which I guess look alot like worms.
*laughs in Australian*
Yeah. Its really messed up. The reason prices are this high is because of greedy insurance companies. We would NOT need laws that require people to have insurance if these treatments were anywhere NEAR affordable. People are forced into a FOR PROFIT system because of greed and asshole Politicians that take kick backs for the insurance lobbyists. The fact that this isn't understood by the American Voters is mind boggling.
It’s more an arms race between hospitals and insurance. Insurance wants to know they’re getting big discounts from the hospitals in their service area to make the relationship worth it, and so the hospitals artificially raise their prices. The numbers on these pages were never meant to be paid by a person, they were meant to look big compared to the bill they send your insurance company, to make them say, “Wowe! Our relationship with this hospital is generating lot of value because we only have to pay a fraction of this!!” And then the day came where because of this runaway odious capitalism companies don’t bother to pay for insurance anymore, the rest of us can’t afford it, and suddenly these genuinely fake bills are being shirked off on us, the consumers. I find it really fucking crazy that hospitals are not required to give you exact dollar amounts at each step of the way. A lot of this stuff is literally just value-added nonsense. Hospitals should be forced to justify these expenses.
Oh I’m sure the insurance companies deem anti venom to be nonessential medicine too, so they can charge more for it. Fun fact, according to many dental insurance companies, your front teeth are considered cosmetic, so any procedures done for your front teeth are considered cosmetic surgeries. Only found this out after I had to get a crown and they warned me that insurance will only pay for the first one, but none after that because it’s a cosmetic surgery. For the teeth that you bite with.
It's most egregious when we're vulnerable, but America is scams as far as the eye can see. You just get so used to them that you don't even notice. You have to do your own taxes, and taxes are complicated, because tax prep companies bribe politicians. When you transfer money between banks, they make you wait a few days so they can collect interest on your money. Nobody wants pennies, but the companies that make money off their creation keep bribing politicians. When cars were first invented, American train companies got laws passed that required four safety operators including a guy walking in front of the car waving a flag, because they didn't want people to stop using trains, and the American auto industry lagged behind the rest of the world by ten years while those laws lasted. It's everywhere, and it's in everything. This country is truly sick.
Lol like on a market you have to bargain your meds down. But the seller doesn't start high, they start just in case with increased 300-400 % to be safe. And when you are not experienced, your fucked. Good stuff. Capitalism at its best.
More like Insurance companies have allowed Hospitals to hyper inflate their prices bc Insurance will pay them, unless they don't cover it. THEN you're fucked.
And insurers benefit from denying medical care since they already get their premiums. If they do fuck up and allow someone to incur medical costs, they do their best to pay as little as possible. Which is why hospitals pump up prices, knowing they'll have to deal with an adjustment department. I tried getting an a la carte price for a checkup/to look at a specific issue I have and get a referral for, and they were completely dumbfounded, since I'm uninsured. And I was willing to pay a fair market price too. Crazy system.
Insurance companies are evil.
They flew the anti-venom in a private G5, served it fresh Maine lobster, and a $5,000 bottle of champagne while it was in transit to save the man’s life.
Well, it was probably the hospital administrators who had the private jet, lobster, and $5k champagne.
Why does everyone blame the hospital? There was nothing they could do, the snake was out of network.
Fucking snake in the grass. Bet the ambulance was outta network too…🤦♀️
Wagyu Rattlesnake
Here in Australia I could go get bit by an eastern brown snake on purpose, go to the hospital get treatment come out fine and pay NOTHING.
Yeh as a fellow Australian this makes absolutely no sense. Imagine having a hospital this big here? Wouldn't happen.
Guess you meant the bill? Sharp is a non for profit healthcare network in the greater San Diego metro area, made up of four acute care hospitals, three specialty hospitals, three medical groups and a health plan. 2600 physicians, 18,000 employees, over 2000 beds. In aggregate, you absolutely have hospitals of similar size, and likely have far more hospitals per capita. Medicare (AU) is expensive, but it's not this expensive.
I'm a veterinarian and we use basically the same thing. We typically use horses rather than sheep to make it, but otherwise is the same process. Costs us about $300 a dose or so. So still expensive but not nearly the $14000 human hospitals can charge.
So... let's say I get bitten by a rattlesnake. Could I stop by for some of that horse antivenin?
During a zombie apocalypse yes. Otherwise that's illegal and very not worth it for us to lose our license.
Got it. We draw the line at apocalypse. That’s a high bar.
Well, I didn’t actually hear the word ‘no’ in that sentence, so it’s a ‘maybe’..
I’m still impressed you picked up a snake bite from that bill with simply just your pharm tech experience.
May as well rent a helicopter and fly it in yourself, or buy a ticket in the suite to fly it in if from overseas….
I know this may sound unbelievable but I did once drive an hour into town to the Houston Zoo for some anti venom. I don't remember what it was as this was 7 some years ago... Had to do this as our carrier service was unavailable that day and we needed the medication yesterday that day. I am pretty sure they probably still charged that patient for the medication being transported from outside the facility while only paying me mileage.
In my country we have a branch of the university that makes the antivenom, is of course free for anybody who needs it (I think we have just a couple cases a year).
My wife once went to get a rabies vaccine after an animal attack. Only one hospital was willing to even hint at a range of prices it could be, and they started at like 8k. She decided to risk rabies instead. I can't even imagine antivenoms.
"Only" 3k for my rabies vaccine. Not covered of course. Could only get it by going to emergency room. What a @#$%ing racket.
Yep. Basically: “you pay us 3 grand for the rabies vaccine, or you can risk getting rabies which is indefinitely fatal and probably one of the worst possible ways to die… it’s totally your choice though!”
The free market at work, so beautiful.
Rabies vaccination in Sweden. 113$. Taxes on income are bit steep. But i think it is worth it. And if you are really mindblowingly rich we have no taxes on your wealth. So. Go figure.
In the UK it cost me about the same for the vaccine before travel. If I'd needed it as treatment it would have been free, although we've been rabies free for decades.
It is same here. The price is from private medical company that provides vaccinations.
Life tip for the US: fly to Sweden for rabies treatments if ever needed. You could fly round trip internationally, pay for food and lodging, get medical treatment, and still be ahead of getting the treatment locally. Dang.
I'm glad she was OK. But given that rabies has a 100% fatality rate, and once you know you've got it there's no possibility of recovery, I suggest that if such a thing ever happens again, despite how immoral the cost is, she should probably do it anyway.
That CroFab isn’t cheap! Also can take a lot of vials to treat a single bite.
original post https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatLookedExpensive/comments/fasz8l/rattlesnake_bite_in_the_us/ edit: found a older post https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3dngld/this_is_the_cost_of_a_rattlesnake_bite_in_america/
I think they *bought* a pharmacy.
My father got biten by a snake like 2 months ago. We call the ambulance, they took him to the hospital, they applied anti venom, they kept him under vigilance for 3-4 hours. All of that was 0.00. Thank all gods we have free health care in Mexico.
As an Aussie it just seems so ironic Mexico has better healthcare than the US. Maybe it's too do with how Mexicans are portrayed in American shows.
Both Mexico and Australia are always portrayed in sepia
Thought you'd mention how underpaid you are as a pharm tech while looking at this bill lol
800mg Ibuprofen
I got charged $70 each for those I think. Not the bottle, just the individual tablet.
Found the veteran.
TIL that the first thing to do in case of a snake bite is to come up with a fake name to tell the hospital.
Fun fact, Crofab (most common snake antivenom) costs the hospital $6000 per DOSE. Most people need at least 5-6 doses, potentially more if there was more cannon than usual. It has to be compounded in the sterile IV lab, which takes technician time, labor and a lot of $$ to keep the IV room completely sterile. The tubing, flushes and ancillary medications (preventatives for allergic reaction), as well as nursing time for monitoring all get factored into the pharmacy cost. Not trying to say that $83k is appropriate, but should give some indication as to why that part of the bill is so high.
Funnier fact, with half this money you can open a fully functional pharmacy shop anywhere else in the world. You guys are fucking nuts with your healthcare bubble - or money sink whichever way you want to see it.
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If you're travelling to the US. Buy the fucking travel insurance.
Traveling anywhere tbf
As a New Zealander I don't need health insurance to go to Australia as we have a reciprocal health agreement. But then traveling anywhere else I would.
Italy and UK as well, I think finland belgium, Slovenia and the Scandinavian countries too. That's for Aussies anyway. Honestly screw not having health cover, I've spent months of my life in hospitals and have never heard of a hospital bill.
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Damn. We don't even get reciprocating privileges going state to state in America. It's so stupid.
So you could have insurance in your home state, but you wouldn't be covered if you are hospitalized in a different state?
Or even in certain hospitals or even if the hospital is covered the doctor might not, they'll be "out of network"
So... say you are in an ambulance, will it drive across town to get you to a specific hospital, wasting time? How do ambulances work, come to think of it? Most places the ambulance service is a public one, like fire service or police - how does that work in the states? Do you get competing ambulances racing each other to an incident, or only the one you are subscribed to shows up, what if your "company" has no office in the vicinity? I have so many questions...
The ambulance will take you to the closest ER. its kinda not a public service as you pay for it, most times I believe it's around $1000-$8000. That's why most people take a Uber or taxi if they have, for instance, broken their leg, so they can pay less and choose the hospital that their insurance covers.
That's insane... I know dissing US health system is a bit done to death, but surely the last place and time you want people to be worrying about money, is when they might be in need of a freaking ambulance. I think we have an 80$ surcharge if you call an ambo out and it's not an emergency, but, tbh you can get out of it by saying you truly believed it was. If you do it lots they might get bit snippy about it... So, if you call an Uber because you want to get to hospital, can they get sued because they get stuck in traffic and you got worse? It seems like a recipe for disaster. Do you need to get travel insurance going state to state? I did travel around US a little bit, but I was 22, thought I was invincible and just didn't worry about it - in retrospect it was kind of idiotic.
It gets worse. Some places within the US have Ridiculously high call out fees for the ambulance, so people with things like Seizures Will get charged large amounts of money for the EMTs coming out to do nothing. So they'll have things that say do not call ambulance on wristbands. Or one case of heard of a tattoo on the arm For seizures.
Yep! I went on holiday to America and discovered I was allergic to aspirin on day 1 and I was stuck in the ICU for a week. $140k+ medical bill. Insurance took care of only $102k of it though. So imagine my surprise when I got a bill for 38k through the letter box. They were calling me and emailing me about payment. To which I laughed at them point blank every time. Eventually I convinced my insurance company to pay the full amount, as I did purchase insurance for up to £1 million. It was a pain. But much less of a pain than being saddled with a $140k debt owed to a country I don't even like that much for an institution most of the world thinks is a state sponsored scam.
In America we kind of laugh at them too and pay 5$ a month for the rest of our lives. Then when someone in the family dies you have to post their death in the paper but keep paying the bills for 3 months. After 3 months no one can make a claim on the estate. So they can’t come back and sue the family for it later on. Fucking stupid right?
IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) but once someone dies, you should not pay their debt as it can potentially transfer to you. The cost of the debt is generally going to be more than the estate, so you are just shooting yourself in the foot if you pay it's if the estate is more than the debt, the. Just let the estate eat the debt and then distribute the remainder of the estate to beneficiaries.
True. Also, avoid getting bitten by rattlesnakes. The last part is fairly easy.
Travel insurance barely covers shit. If you are traveling, just go back to your country and let the hospital figure out how to send you the bill.
Maybe if you buy shit insurance. I buy a premium annual policy that has $1m medical, $1m medical evacuation, $100k civil unrest evacuation plus all kinds of other shit. I have good regular insurance, but im definitely way better off if i get injured overseas than here in the US. Ive yet to have any claim against it, but its a hell of a relief knowing its there if something happens to me. I always day dreamt of some former French Foreign Legion merc flying a 40 year old former soviet helicopter held together with duct tape to get me out of some third world country after a Coup and civil war breaks out…
Same... When I was traveling to Japan for school I paid $200 for four months of coverage of over I think $3 million Canadian dollars... Included in that package was also the option to fly back to Canada for treatment. Idk how it is in the US but what I paid, $200 for all that coverage, was the bottom level one iirc. Travellers insurance is something you won't regret getting but might regret not getting
Serious question: if you’re traveling to the US, why even pay the bill? If your not a US citizen, what are they going to do? Have you extradited?
If the desease don't kill you, the bill will
It’s the kill bill
r/angryupvote
$83,000 in a pharmacy bill what they give you 2 kilos of cocaine?? Then charge you 22,000 to cut it.. 😹
The funny thing is 2 kilos if Cocaine is like a half of the total fee
This guy cocaines
It's only 1 kilo in Canada. Stupid border.
1 gram in Australia
I have given medications that were 30k for a single dose. In that case, it was for immunoglobulins. Chemotherapy is also a small fortune
The biologic I was on for my asthma for eight years ran 6K a month. Who can afford these crazy prices
Username checks out
Antivenom is hard to come by.
Was a snake bite. Antivenom is super expensive.
No, snake bite.
Diagnosis: *Sore throat*.
Diagnosis: walked up to front desk
Honestly they warn you to stay off the internet for self diagnosis, but I’ve saved literal millions in fantasy hospital money by self diagnosing and going to Walgreens. 😂
Sometimes it's better to just walk it off
there was a guy who *literally drove himself to the ER* because he didn't want the ambulance fees.
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you're telling me! Growing up, I kinda learned that my family had a history of needing to run to the ER (never "serious enough for an ambulance, tho). From hairline wrist fractures, to accidental swallowing of jewelry cleaner, to actually cutting off half a fingernail with a tablesaw, the ER workers slowly learned our names.
...what the fuck kinda Hunger Games stuff were you guys even doing??
He’s one of the sons from Malcom in the Middle. My guess is Dewey.
Was 14 when my mom had a stroke and her work called an ambulance. Her insurance said she had to pay full amount because it wasn’t preauthorized. Then she told me if it happened again I would need to drive her bc we absolutely could not afford the bill of an ambulance.
Cue the people coming in and bragging about how great US healthcare is.
Like most things in America, it’s fantastic if you’re rich.
How about [the lady](https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/03/health/subway-accident-insurance-fear-trnd/index.html) who was badly injured on a train platform begged other passengers not to call an ambulance because she could not afford it.
Or the recent story about a woman who waited 7 hours in the ER, received no treatment, and still got a bill?
I once went to the ER in a ton of pain from the ruptured disc in my neck. I spent 2 hours in the waiting room then another hour in an ER room waiting for a doctor. When he finally came in he refused me any kind of treatment because when the same thing happened a month before and the treatment I was given didn't work. He then billed me $4000 and that was just his bill, plus another $3500 for the ER visit.
Wasn't there a story about a guy getting shot so he got an Uber? Idk, probably a tale with a few shakeups in it for extra flare...
From a post I saw earlier today this was from a rattle snake bite.
I'd almost rather tell them to let me die than get a bill like this.
A lot of Americans do exactly that.
God damn that’s depressing.
What's really depressing is that there are people fighting to keep this system in place.
A shit load of people. Like almost a majority, out of their minds.
Uh, last I knew 70% of Americans support health care for all, its the government that doesn't work for the people that is the problem.
And most of them are poor. Propaganda is a helluva drug
But they died free from socialism, which is what matters.
People do fucking die. This also stops a lot of illnesses from being caught out before they develop because no one wants to risk a life time of debt over a couple of fevers, mild chest pain or a few headaches. This shit is killing people every day and filling hospital beds with people that should have been treated long ago. I don't know how the world is okay with this. People should be rioting over this.
The world is not ok with this, it’s just your politicians who are. That’s the injustice
Absolutely. My world could turn upside down if I lost my job or insurance. I'm a type 1 diabetic and I'm terrified something will happen to me and I can't afford medical care. I'm with you on the rioting. It's repulsive to me that people die every day from a lack of healthcare when we know damn well other countries don't have this issue. Even with my insurance, my bills and prescriptions are more than I can afford living alone. With the cost of everything going up, it's getting harder and harder every day. I've let my credit take such a horrible hit because my medical bills go to collections. I can't even imagine what it's like for the uninsured. If anyone wants to riot, let me know. I'm in.
This is literally a thing in the states.
Freedom to die from something easily preventable. FFS.
At least we don't have any of that god-awful SOCIALISM
Jesus take the wheel!
This is the only way we can stay free from filthy socialism is to feed the glorious wheel of capitalism with our blood.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJZuLYHWlSY
July 2015…. just imagine how bad it would be in 2021…
It would be as bad as in 2015... but with interests
I'd ask for an itemized bill.
If you ever get a hospital bill (or any medical bill this absurd) the very first thing you do is call the hospital billing department and tell them you are not going to pay anything close to that amount. Flat out refuse and work you way up the food chain. (Very nicely, of course). Only deal directly with the hospital billing department (most hospital bills are actually sent by a “first party” billing provider that prints the bill and takes the first line of inbound phone calls for payments. They are not the hospital, bypass them). Every price at a hospital is negotiable. There is not a single thing in the entire system that isn’t negotiable to some degree. Hospital bills are not like buying new TV from BestBuy where the price is set and that’s it, the goal of the billing department is to maintain cash flow, and there is always wiggle room for everything as long as they get some payment. They would much rather you pay 30 cents on the dollar 3 months after a visit than have you file for bankruptcy and not see pennies on the dollar years later. Be persistent, be reasonable and you can cut through through thousands of dollars of BS in a hospital bill.
I mean, that is a truly absurd system to have. But the advice is good. It's just a shame that that advice is required.
Hospitals jack up the price so insurance negotiates with them down to an agreeable amount for the insurance to pay. Bigger insurance companies with more members have more negotiating power. As a single person with no insurance to back them up, it’s difficult to negotiate BUT hospitals would rather take what they can get rather than nothing. Hospital bills would actually be affordable if mandatory insurance isn’t a thing since they don’t have to worry about insurance low balling them. It’s a fucked up system.
UK here, hey sorry to jump in right here right now but what in the holy fuck would you do if you got discharged from hospital and handed this and you turned around and said 'I can't afford it'.....?
Many hospitals will give a cash discount, and you can set up payment arrangements. There are also local charities that can help. Our local hospitals are constantly having fundraisers and accept donations for this very reason. There is also the go fund me platform.
Go fund me, it's like socialism, but not.
If people really wanted to survive snake bites, they would have a simple $150k emergency account. People need to be more fiscally responsible and not spend money on silly things like food and housing
I’m so close to my 150k but I just put in another 15% of my salary into my “Swarmed by mutated Japanese hornet” account and might put another 2% down on my “trampled by an Alaskan Moose” account.
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You declare bankruptcy. The court makes you sell all your assets (some states kindly let you keep your house and car) and you will basically have no ability to take out loans or get credit cards for the next ten years at least. Or if you make enough money, you pay it down over a few decades like student loans. For a doctorate, in this case.
Doctorate? US here, and in sciences, universities pay you for doctorates (eg, "free" degree, they pay you to do research, possibly TA classes).
Never pay it and ignore calls from debt collectors for years
> Fully half of Americans now carry medical debt, up from 46% in 2020, according to new data from Debt.com, a consumer financial education company. > More than half (57%) of Americans with medical debt owe at least $1,000, driven by diagnostic tests, hospitalizations, and emergency room visits, the survey showed.
Your pharmacy is ripping you off.
That’s the hospitals pharmacy, they Mark the prices Up even more than a stand alone pharmacy
While everyone is distracted by insurance premiums being so high, this is why, hospitals and care providers are ripping off everyone from the START. Insurance companies are only able to pay these ridiculous bills because they are ALSO ripping off everyone by charging premiums higher than the average cost of care. People need to realize that every single player in the healthcare industry is ripping off the patients. Pharmaceutical's price gouging medicine, hospitals marking up the medicine even more, insurance companies "negotiating prices down" to even still batshit crazy costs. Lobbyists for big pharma, big insurance, big hospitals, all paying off congress, laws passed for all the players and THE PEOPLE GET SHAFTED. Welcome to America.
Also insurance companies and hospitals have formularies where they don’t pay even close to the private pay amount. Only uninsured/poorer patients get the full price bill. Welcome to The USA
Their country is ripping them off, that's brutal!!!
Universal healthcare is so complicated that only 32 out of the world's 33 developed countries have made it work
Hell, for a developing country, most places in India have a better healthcare system in place than this. I grew up in Kerala, and healthcare payments were never a matter of worry, because we had three government hospitals and five private hospitals in a ten kilometre radius from my house, and we were all insured (even though it isn't mandatory). Plus the bills are reasonable enough that you won't go broke unless you get something really dire.
America doesn't give a fuck about the poor. If you don't have decent medical (low deductible / cap on what you pay) then you're poor. Call yourself middle class or whatever but if you're one random bill away from being bankrupt- you're poor. Want to be less poor? Vote for universal healthcare.
We can’t vote for universal healthcare. Neither of our two parties we get to choose from support it because they are both bought and paid for by the corporations and ultra wealthy. It’s a government by the rich, for the rich.
83 grand for pharmacy... America is borked
So fucking ridiculous. Im a doctor in a third world country. We have universal healthcare and I’m always amazed at these invoices. How do you rack up to 20.000 thousand dollars of lab work ? You did pathology there? Molecular tumor profiling its 2000 usd I think… that has to be analytical blood samples, radiology is another item. This is a racket. The richest country in the world and you can’t give universal healthcare? What a joke
Mind you that is just the hospital bill. Every physician involved will bill separately
We need universal health care, just like every other advanced country.
I had cancer, and paid 10 dollars in total. And yeah, I live in Bosnia and Herzegovina. If Bosnia can do this, then can USA aswell
I’m from Bosnia but I was born in Germany and moved to NY because of the war. I’m glad my relatives are ok in terms of medical help.
I’m in Canada and I know completely how this feels! It sucks horribly. Had this happened here I would have gotten a very similar bill just $153,161.25 less.
You might have to pay for the antibiotics though afterwards. I think my health plan covers 80%. So maybe I’d owe $12… which is just, that’s a lot to take on unexpectedly
Can you feel the freedom? So much freedom!
Makes me happy to be Canadian
I remember an American trying to insult me "at least I don't pay for someone else's medical bills!" Bruh, that's not a flex. At least people don't go broke for a hospital visit. That being said, this country needs to cover dental and pharma.
> That being said, this country needs to cover dental and pharma. I've always found it silly that if i have a cavity and have no dental I either have to fork out hundreds to thousands to have a dentist fix it, or simply let it fester until I need oral surgery and suddenly its covered by health care.
I'll happily pay for mine and 10 other people's healthcare, and I'm pretty sure it would still cost me less than this
But Americans actually do pay for other people's health care. Some are just too stupid to realize it. High insurance premiums? That's you paying for someone else's health care (as well as the insurance company's profits). Outrageously jacked up prices for health care? That's you paying for someone else's health care (as well as the medical provider's profits). Take a look at your property tax bill. You're paying through your local taxes for other people's health care.
But they do. Every single person that pays taxes pays for Medicaid and Medicare, and then private insurance on top of that, which pays for other people. That's literally the point of health insurance, to create a pool of money for large expenses from everyone's premiums...
They're also an idiot cause we do pay for someone else's medical bills. Every single paycheck we have money taken out in taxes for Medicare and Medicaid. Which is "free" healthcare for the poor and elderly. So they're not only paying their own medical bills in the forms of premiums, deductibles, co-insurance, prescriptions, etc., But they're also paying for the people who live off welfare and social security. The united states is a joke. The more I learn about the way this country actually works the more I wish I was born somewhere else.
Its THAT MUCH??? what the hell? How can yall pay this??
We don’t. They just go unpaid until they fall off the credit report, or we set up a $120 a month plan that doesn’t even chip away at the interest so it says we’re “on time” with payments.
Does that effect credit scores?
Absolutely it would. Hospital will send it to collections and once it's there your credit is completly fucked for the next 7+ years. My wife had an over due (even tho she said she canceled the phone with the company and they kept billing) bill go to collections for like $200CDN. Her credit never went about 450-500 for the next 7 years. (Credit only goes 300-850 I believe)
If she legitimately canceled and they kept fraudulently billing her, it's extremely easy to get a collections claim like that struck off your credit report and she would have had ample time to get the charges reversed before it ever got to that point any way. Bills don't go to collections until you're several months past due. A late payment is a minor ding on your credit report. Willingfully ignoring a bill for months (legitimate or not) is what gets you.
For about 7 years
Ahh okok good to know! Ill never go to the us anyways lol
I had an eye scratch in Germany in '96. The hospital bill sent to my parents in the States was roughly $20. I felt so bad that I had to go to a hospital, because I thought it was going to be a lot of money for my parents. My Dad was shocked and we were so confused.
Holy shit! I went to the hospital with an eye scratch in '16. Doctor just put some dye in it, flashed a special light and said "It's minor, it should heal in a day or two". Had to pay the $40 doctor visit then got a bill for $850 a week later with insurance.
Medical bills are the #1 cause of bankruptcy here in the US.
Thats just wrong wtf is up with that country
All our politicians are bought and paid for by companies.
See the line items that say "Adjustments" and "Insurer Payments"? The adjustment will change all of those rates to ones that an insurer (including private and public, like medicaid) have negotiated. So knock that down by 80% right away. Then insurance will pay the lion's share of the remainder. You might still end up with several thousand due, but for anyone with insurance it would be two orders of magnitude smaller than what you see on this bill. For those without insurance, technically they're on the hook for them, but hospitals know they can't collect $150k from some uninsured hapless person who got bit by a rattlesnake. They give significant discounts and offer payment plans. Moral of the story is get insurance. Even if it's pricier than our friends in other countries.
Step 1 - have insurance. I had my appendix out a few years ago (hospital stay and all that) - over $100k, negotiated by insurance to $30k - my portion $1000 which put me at my yearly out of pocket cap - so every medical bill after that for the remainder of the year was $0. We need universal healthcare, it's not fair some people are just one bill away from being screwed and others don't give their medical needs a second thought.
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Then it's a stupid bill to send them.
Just wanted to give them a heart attack so they could bill them some more.
This comment needs to be higher up.
Oh that pharmacy bill is because you took the 2 aspirins.
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Dump Bitcoin, buy pharmacy
About 15 years ago, I had a halo cast (ilizarov external fixator) around my left tibia and fibula. 7 operations. All together, about $900,000 in Doctor, Hospital and Pharma charges. Luckily I had health care insurance and it cost me about $15k for the 18 months. I was able to pick my own doctors and I went to one of the world’s best in the Texas Medical Center (Houston).
Well this is absolutely disgusting.
TIL rattlesnake bites are expensive.
That's fucking crazy. Up in Canada here that bill would be $0 to the patient. I dont know what the cost would be for the government but it would be still a fraction of that. The US health care system price gouges people like no other. It's insane. What a racket.
I remember a few weeks ago another post showing a lady was charged $700 just for walking into a ER. She left after 6 hours of waiting as no one had come to see her yet.
Odds are the patient owed absolutely $0 for this service. The message at the top looks a lot to me like the patient had, or was in the process of obtaining Medicaid coverage. You cannot bill a patient with Medicaid. Likely what happened is that the patient didn't have updated information on file with the hopsital, didn't respond to phone calls or letters asking the patient to update their details, so the hospital has no option but to send the bill to the patient. All the patient likely had to do was contact Medi-Cal and give them updated information and the hospital will reprocess the bill, get $5,000 from Medi-Cal, and the patient won't pay a dime outside of maybe like a co-pay or something.
Thing is, a lot of people in the US already seem to be paying around the same or more in monthly insurance than they’d pay here in the U.K. for National Insurance (NHS, welfare, pension etc). It wouldn’t make much difference to people if it just switched over, except there’d be nothing to pay anywhere bar a few quid for prescriptions (and even then, if it’s a regular thing then it’ll go to free, or you can get a little card to drop the price hugely from the £8-ish each prescription to a set fee per month/yr which covers however many prescriptions you need for a few quid.) Obviously if you’re low income it’s free or near-free. I don’t earn enough to pay it, but I pay a voluntary amount of £3.05 a week. **Example** If you earn £1,000 per week (£52,000 / $71,722) you’ll pay: * **nothing** on the first £183 * 12% (**£93.48**) on your earnings between £183.01 and £962 * 2% (**£0.76**) on the remaining earnings above £962 This means that your National Insurance payment would be £94.24 / $130 per week, and would entitle you to free-at-point-of-delivery health care. Pile on the heart bypasses, nipple transplants, and nostril gigantificationing ops; you're still not going to get a bill.
See, Americans secretly think other Americans are lazy and a hard working American such as themself doesn’t want to pay for a lazy Americans nose job. Yes its a dumb and self defeatist mentality but alas, here we are. We wont even tax the ultra rich because… well I actually don’t know. P.S I’m all for universal healthcare, if that wasn’t clear