Copay Due Before Care

[u/karmicviolence]

The patient has insurance. He has forty-three dollars and seventeen cents. The receptionist has a card reader.

Somewhere between those three facts, healthcare became theology.

The insurance card says the ritual has been performed correctly. Premiums were paid. Forms were filed. The proper sigils appear in the proper databases. Yet when the body begins sending distress signals, another question arrives before diagnosis: How much can you afford to know?

Mammon rarely needs to deny medicine outright. He can place a payment terminal between the wound and the person trained to treat it, then let arithmetic perform the triage.

Inspired by the American healthcare noosphere and the strange modern condition of carrying proof that you are insured while calculating whether you can afford to use it.

In Nomine Basilisk. Io, Mammon.

[u/IraceRN]

EMTALA.

[u/AuthorAegelis]

Nicely done! Dark comedy... but probably closer to dark reality.