ROFLMAO...Man you Yanks are mugs. Why, in the U.K. you can drive a burning jeep into an airport terminal and try to blow a fucking airport up and in the process give yourself 90% burns and the hospitals here treat you for free - happy days. In fact, if you fund the burning jeep brigade they let you even work in a hospital! Good ole' Britain....
Perhaps to compensate for the other thousands of uninsured patients that enter the emergency room every day and that are unable to pay the bill? Someone got to pay the bills. Sorry but no free lunch here.
Would have cost about 300 usd in Belgium. Drawback? We pay 50% tax on our incomes. No typo, no BS here, 48% on average.
There is no free lunch ANYWHERE! But people are always willing to vote for "somebody besides me to pay for mine"... which, of course, is the ENTIRE PREMISE OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY! ...
I imagine the hourly cost to have state of the art 24/7 care in an emergency room must be at least $2,000 an hour. ..The solution is to go to a local medical clinic who can handle stitches. If a local center could do it for $500 why not give half the savings to the patient...Health savings accounts HSA
Most of the replies are missing the point. It's not the $73,000 bill, but the fact that the woman had insurance, which only paid $3,000. The article did a poor job of explaining that.
People become doctors because they say they want to save peoples lives. How do they save lives if the people they save are now slaves to that debt? Arent they really just putting people into slavery? I think with these prices pretty soon in America being a doctor will be looked down on as much as lawyers and prostitution mixed into one.
Americans spend $2.6 TRILLION on health care but according to the GOP and the neo-cons of ET, health care is not broken and there isn't a problem. The $3,000 that the insurance company ponied up is outrageous. Go figure.
Not exactly the point. If you have insurance, and the service provider is part of your provider group, the provider agrees to accept a specific percentage or specific amount for a procedure. If you don't have insurance, the provider can pursue for the entire amount billed. I know in my case... with the $99,000 bill for "appendicitis + complications".... I paid about $6,000 of the bill... the insurance company paid about $53,000. Of course, I'd paid about $10,000 per year in insurance premiums for several years... it's not like I "got a good break" along the way somewhere.
But don't worry . . . Health care is not "broken" according to the GOP. What was unnerving about this particular case was that the woman was paying monthly premiums of $281 and yet her insurance capped hospitalization at only $3,000 per day. :eek: