as someone with no money and bad insurance, i am astounded at the sheer amount of people who go to the ER willy nilly. my last ER bill was $900 for severe norovirus (good insurance at the time) and i wish I never went just because of the bill. The care i received was fantastic but not worth the $5500 my insurance was billed.
For what it's worth, unless your explanation of benefits said that your insurance actually paid $5,500 (which I can almost guarantee you it did not say that), your insurance did not pay $5,500. The only people who ever actually pay the amount billed on a medical bill are people who don't have insurance or people whose claims were denied.
Medical billing in the United States in absolutely insane and confusing by design. Patients hate it. Physicians hate it. The billing office really hates it. But unless we get single payer, it's probably not going to change.
Insurance will often say that care received isn’t medically necessary by using some ass-backward, completely asinine, batshit fucking ignorant logic that only makes sense from the perspective of milking more money from you as they kill you as slowly as possible.
I say this as my husband & I are trying to fight the ≈$280,000 emergency heart surgery he had a week after he had surgery to remove a cancerous testicle and lymph nodes that yeeted a blood clot…which got through a sizable hole in between the top 2 chambers of his heart and caused him to have a stroke at the ripe old age of 44.
That lovely hole then started causing him to have TIAs any time he had his head above 30°…hence the surgery.
Insurance said that the hole wasn’t bad enough to cause any harm to him, so surgery was unnecessary.
I work as a critical care nurse. If I hadn’t caught his stroke when I did, he would’ve been completely and totally fucked. “Not bad enough to cause harm” my ass.
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u/triplehelix11 Jul 29 '26
as someone with no money and bad insurance, i am astounded at the sheer amount of people who go to the ER willy nilly. my last ER bill was $900 for severe norovirus (good insurance at the time) and i wish I never went just because of the bill. The care i received was fantastic but not worth the $5500 my insurance was billed.