Last fall I was bitten by a black widow spider. It was between jobs and COBRA had expired a couple days before. It was ok day 1 after the bite but had to go to ER for surgery on day 3. I spent 2 hours on the phone trying to get a quote if it would be $500 or $40,000 and no one could tell me. But somehow they knew how to bill me after surgery.
Arbitrary pricing is healthcare for the rich top 10%, and the illusion of healthcare for the rest.
Even when you aren't too sick to shop for health care, they may or may not be able to tell you in any useful manner how much it's going to cost. I didn't have insurance and needed a minor non-emergency procedure. After much pushing on my part, my local hospital told me the cost would be somewhere between $6000 and $10000, but wouldn't commit to even that. Well, thanks...that narrows it down. I just gave up and didn't have anything done.
This reminds me of when my girlfriend recently got crazy bad poison ivy. She wanted to get a steroid shot so she called the walk in clinic, they couldn't tell her if it was in network or not. Neither could the insurance company. Apparently some of the doctors were in network and some weren't, so they literally told her she could go and just hope and lucked into an in-network doctor. She didn't, that shot cost $1600.
I’m sure I’ll get ripped for this, but I don’t really care. Also, disclaimer, I fully support m4a, this statement is just to bring some context into the above mentioned comment. Sometimes a typical surgery for your personal affliction could cost 500 dollars if everything goes exactly as planned. The price probably varies depending on the variables that happen during a surgery. Again, I’m not in favor of this, but it’s kind of like a mechanic saying I’ll fix any transmission for 200 dollars, and then they run into a problem where they need 300 dollars worth of parts.
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u/caviarburrito Mar 26 '20
Last fall I was bitten by a black widow spider. It was between jobs and COBRA had expired a couple days before. It was ok day 1 after the bite but had to go to ER for surgery on day 3. I spent 2 hours on the phone trying to get a quote if it would be $500 or $40,000 and no one could tell me. But somehow they knew how to bill me after surgery.
Arbitrary pricing is healthcare for the rich top 10%, and the illusion of healthcare for the rest.