It isn't just the low income folks that can't afford a broken arm anymore. My daughter broke her arm over the summer. Total cost billed from the hospital was just over $40,000. People focus too much on the cost of insurance and not enough on the outrageous fees that some places are charging for medical care.
Keith
When I was a child, I hurt my arm playing ball. My dad took me to the ER. They x-rayed my arm, found that it wasn't broken, and sent me home with advice to put ice on it and take aspirin for the pain.
Several years ago, my goddaughter was staying with Jeanette and I. While riding her bike she got her pant leg caught in the chain, fell, and banged her arm against the curb.
After spouting a stream of obscenities that I heard through the open window, she untangled herself and was walking into the house as I was walking out the door to check on her. She had a bruise and tenderness on her forearm, but no distortion and full mobility.
I was 99 percent sure there was no fracture, but I decided to take her to the ER anyway. This was more to shut Jeanette up than because I thought it was really necessary, quite frankly. If I'd suffered the same injury I'd have taken an aspirin and iced it down. But I put her arm in a sling and drove to the hospital, anyway.
Because my goddaughter lived out-of-state and the local hospital wasn't in-network, the hospital and doctors initially sent the bills to me to be submitted to the insurance company. They came out to about $27K -- and her arm wasn't even broken. A good percentage of the bill was for **** that wasn't even necessary, in my opinion, for any reason other than to pad the bill. Or maybe it was defensive medicine due to too many ambulance-chasing lawyers, but either way, it was unnecessary and expensive.
For example, she had been wearing a helmet during the accident and was fully alert with zero evidence of head or spine injury when we arrived at the hospital. She'd walked in. There was no dizziness, no gait problems, no pain except at the bruise site, and no reason to suspect anything but, at worst, a fractured ulna. But the hospital backboarded her and put her neck in a c-collar as soon as we walked in, removed them about ten minutes later, and charged healthily for both "procedures."
They also insisted on an MRI (or maybe it was a CT scan, I forget) of her head, as well as imaging of her shoulder, neck, and spine, even though she had no complaints of shoulder, neck, or spine pain or any other reason to suspect anything other than, remotely possibly, a fracture of the ulna.
They also performed a child abuse examination, despite there being no evidence of child abuse. I mean, she still had the grease marks from the bicycle chain on her pants and socks. It was obvious what had happened. But not to the hospital social worker who grilled her about whether she'd
really fallen off her bicycle (and for whose grilling the hospital generously billed).
They also did about $1,800.00 worth of lab work, including drug and alcohol testing. (She was 10 at the time.) I demanded and received an itemized list, and the tests they did, aside from being unnecessary, would have cost less than a hundred bucks at Quest Diagnostics.
When all was said and done, they told me she had a bruise on her forearm, applied an ice pack (for which they charged me more than a hundred bucks), and gave me a prescription for a "painkiller" to be filled at the hospital pharmacy. It was for Tylenol.
I tossed it in the trash and took her home. I didn't even want to think about what their pharmacy would have charged for the acetaminophen. But when I got the bill, they'd charged me for it anyway -- at about $10.00 per pill.
So in the end, the result and advice were the same as when I'd hurt my arm playing ball, with the exception of Tylenol being prescribed instead of aspirin. And the cost.
I know the thread is about insurance, not hospitals. But you really can't separate the two. I have no great love for the insurance industry, but what are they supposed to do when hospitals push tens of thousands in unnecessary procedures every time some kid walks in with a bruise from a bicycle tumble?
It's a racket. It's a bigger racket than the Sicilian and Russian mobs combined. It's a racket worthy of history's biggest RICO indictment. But the hospital industry gets away with it, every single minute of every day, and even manages to maintain an altruistic persona in the process.
It really does make me sick -- no irony intended.
Rich
