For Billing, Press One
[image error]Permit please a small rant—okay maybe a big one, depending on how you classify it. Anyway, here's the story…
On Christmas Eve, my child wakes up with a swollen very painful eye. Being that it's my darling daughter and her most precious eye, her father bundles her up and off they go to the emergency room, while I work on final preparations for celebrating later that evening and the next day.
As emergency room visits go, this one is fairly quick although the doc isn't completely certain she knows what it is that my daughter has. Still, she assumes (is this a good thing with doctors?) it's Pink Eye and gives her some ointment. By the day after Christmas, my daughter is feeling better and we've put the incident behind us under the filing of 'Christmas Eves to remember' (there is for instance, the year that my entire family, plus my then new sister-in-law, got the crawling-on-the-floor-to-the-bathroom flu).
But unfortunately that isn't the end of the story. On New Year's Eve, she got really sick at a performance of Mummenshantz (that we subsequently didn't get to see) and then woke up to both eyes swollen and painful on New Year's Day—so back we went to the emergency room and another doctor who gave her another ointment. And still a verdict of maybe Pink Eye. And most of the day was lost to the ER waiting room.
Now, lest you think we're awful parents, we'd already made an appointment at the ophthalmologists—even when we thought it was getting better. So that Tuesday (after New Year's) off she went to the doctor who of course did identify the problem, not Pink Eye, some other bacterial infection. And armed with new ointment, my daughter recovered and is now fine.
Okay so what's the rant? Certainly not the ER visits—I'd do it again in a heartbeat! But we got the bill yesterday—and the total was—wait for it…. $3000.00 dollars. You read that right. THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS. (Now to be fair we have great insurance and that was not the amount we had to pay). But my rant is that what exactly did they do at the ER that warranted $3000. She had a swollen eye, which they misdiagnosed (twice) and then gave her the wrong ointment. Certainly that's worth payment (even with the mistake which to their credit they openly said was possible). But THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS. [image error]
After years studying as a political scientist, I view most politics with a skeptical eye, but something is definitely wrong with the American Health Care system when a routine visit to the ER costs that kind of money. I don't have a problem with paying more for an emergency room visit. But an equivalent doctor's visit wouldn't have been more than a couple hundred. Possibly even less. So the discrepancy seems a bit much. And can you imagine what a real emergency –like a heart-attack must cost?
Anyway, there it is for what it's worth. And something we all need to think about. And don't even get me started on healthy people that can't get insurance for ridiculous reasons—like the removal of a spleen when they were young. YEESH…
How about you? Any run-ins with the ER lately? Are you overwhelmed with the cost of medicine today? Or just want to rant about something in your life? Well, now is your chance—rant away!
