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$500 for a single stitch??



SAN FRANCISCO — With blood oozing from deep lacerations, the two patients arrived at California Pacific Medical Center’s tidy emergency room. Deepika Singh, 26, had gashed her knee at a backyard barbecue. Orla Roche, a rambunctious toddler on vacation with her family, had tumbled from a couch, splitting open her forehead on a table.

On a quiet Saturday in May, nurses in blue scrubs quickly ushered the two patients into treatment rooms. The wounds were cleaned, numbed and mended in under an hour. “It was great — they had good DVDs, the staff couldn’t have been nicer,” said Emer Duffy, Orla’s mother.

Then the bills arrived. Ms. Singh’s three stitches cost $2,229.11. Orla’s forehead was sealed with a dab of skin glue for $1,696. “When I first saw the charge, I said, ‘What could possibly have cost that much?’ ” recalled Ms. Singh. “They billed for everything, every pill.”

In a medical system notorious for opaque finances and inflated bills, nothing is more convoluted than hospital pricing, economists say. Hospital charges represent about a third of the $2.7 trillion annual United States health care bill, the biggest single segment, according to government statistics, and are the largest driver of medical inflation, a new study in The Journal of the American Medical Association found.

A day spent as an inpatient at an American hospital costs on average more than $4,000, five times the charge in many other developed countries, according to the International Federation of Health Plans, a global network of health insurance industries.

The most expensive hospitals charge more than $12,500 a day. And at many of them, including California Pacific Medical Center, emergency rooms are profit centers. That is why one of the simplest and oldest medical procedures — closing a wound with a needle and thread — typically leads to bills of at least $1,500 and often much more.

At Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, Daniel Diaz, 29, a public relations executive, was billed $3,355.96 for five stitches on his finger after cutting himself while peeling an avocado. At a hospital in Jacksonville, Fla., Arch Roberts Jr., 56, a former government employee, was charged more than $2,000 for three stitches after being bitten by a dog. At Mercy Hospital in Port Huron, Mich., Chelsea Manning, 22, a student, received bills for close to $3,000 for six stitches after she tripped running up a path. Insurers and patients negotiated lower prices, but those charges were a starting point.

Read the whole article. If you get sick from it, don't go to the hospital......

Conks protect the status quo.




"$4000, please."

Do these people not have insurance? My wife partially amputated her finger 6 years ago. She required 14 stitches and our bill was about $350.

People with no insurance clog the ER's and they get paid for by...everyone else
Ambulance chasers like John Edwards drive up malpractice awards that get paid for by....everyone else

ASUG8 wrote:People with no insurance clog the ER's and they get paid for by...everyone else
Ambulance chasers like John Edwards drive up malpractice awards that get paid for by....everyone else

And yet a law that will allow millions of them to become insured is the end of civilization as we know it...

Grizalltheway wrote:

ASUG8 wrote:People with no insurance clog the ER's and they get paid for by...everyone else
Ambulance chasers like John Edwards drive up malpractice awards that get paid for by....everyone else

And yet a law that will allow millions of them to become insured is the end of civilization as we know it...

If they can't afford insurance now what makes you think they will in the future? Mandate coverage then penalize them for not having it when they don't have the money for either?

Ibanez wrote:Do these people not have insurance? My wife partially amputated her finger 6 years ago. She required 14 stitches and our bill was about $350.

And the hospital charged your insurance company $10,000. Your company's rates are probably going up 10-25% a year. We all paid for your wife's finger.

Our current insurance system is one of the drivers of these prices.

ASUG8 wrote:People with no insurance clog the ER's and they get paid for by...everyone else
Ambulance chasers like John Edwards drive up malpractice awards that get paid for by....everyone else

Boilerplate conk bullshit. You should be ashamed, you fucking asshole.

If there is one thing that even the dumbasses of this country could understand from this article is:

Our healthcare system has been broken for some time, and it still is.

D1B wrote:

ASUG8 wrote:People with no insurance clog the ER's and they get paid for by...everyone else
Ambulance chasers like John Edwards drive up malpractice awards that get paid for by....everyone else

Boilerplate conk bullshit. You should be ashamed, you fucking asshole.

I'll add in rising obesity (stroke, heart attacks, high blood pressure) and diabetes rates as well as the aging of the baby boomers just so you feel better.

Ibanez wrote:Do these people not have insurance? My wife partially amputated her finger 6 years ago. She required 14 stitches and our bill was about $350.

$350 isn't all it cost. That's your share of it.

Shameful. Arbitrary pricing - whatever the market will bear. Rush Limbaugh and his little brother, Baldy, are surely proud.

D1B wrote:

Ibanez wrote:Do these people not have insurance? My wife partially amputated her finger 6 years ago. She required 14 stitches and our bill was about $350.

And the hospital charged your insurance company $10,000. Your company's rates are probably going up 10-25% a year. We all paid for your wife's finger.

My rates went up about 2% this year. The posted employer contribution went up about another 5%.

andy7171 wrote:

Ibanez wrote:Do these people not have insurance? My wife partially amputated her finger 6 years ago. She required 14 stitches and our bill was about $350.

$350 isn't all it cost. That's your share of it.

No shit. That's the point. These people are paying $3k for a few stitches and the question is are they insured?

I agree, hospital prices are astronomical and it's completely unacceptable that they don't provide a "menu" of the charges. It's arbitrary and they can get away with it b/c medical attention is necessary.

Mama Cat and I added up the bills and my two stays at hospital last winter, including my two surgeries and everything else, cost around $1MM. Can't IMAGINE what it would cost if I was in California at the time. Insurance paid for all but about $3500.

Perusing the itemized bills, we found outrageous charges such at $49 for two extra-strength Tylenol - something I had every day in my second stay for the incision infection. Ambien for sleep - $44 per tablet. Every saline flush of my IV - $60 - and I must had 10-12 a day. Home nurse told me that her employer buys the saline-filled syringes for $40/gross.
One ambulance ride was $1790. Second one, hours later, was $19,000! Yep, had decent insurance and glad to be alive, but, something's wrong.

And, then.....the second hospital came after us for $7000 more in "unpaid" charges. Pushed back and said insurance was supposed to pay for those. They hmmmmed and hahhhhed and eventually dropped it, but not after calling every two days for payment. Ended up charging insurance after all, after they tried to get us to fork it over. Later found out that the health system to which this hospital belonged was notorious in Minnesota for its relentless pursuit of patient money and unsavory practices in doing so.

Ibanez wrote:

andy7171 wrote: $350 isn't all it cost. That's your share of it.

No shit. That's the point. These people are paying $3k for a few stitches and the question is are they insured?

I agree, hospital prices are astronomical and it's completely unacceptable that they don't provide a "menu" of the charges. It's arbitrary and they can get away with it b/c medical attention is necessary.

Ding, ding, ding! Hospitals will charge whatever they can get because a majority of consumers don't actually pay that amount and in many cases theirs a lack of competition. Free market insurance fail...

Ibanez wrote: I agree, hospital prices are astronomical and it's completely unacceptable that they don't provide a "menu" of the charges. It's arbitrary and they can get away with it b/c medical attention is necessary.

No worry, Obamacare addresses those issues in Section 786, Subsection 389.28, paragraph 87, in the sentence that begins and ends with:

YOU'RE ALL F*CKED.

















Oh, and Death Panels will help decide what kind of medical attention is "necessary, " and for whom.

Cap'n Cat wrote:Shameful. Arbitrary pricing - whatever the market will bear. Rush Limbaugh and his little brother, Baldy, are surely proud.

Cappy, I honestly don't think you're as ignorant as you are trying to portray in this thread.

Please don't tell me you actually pay the sticker price when you buy a car.

Cap'n Cat wrote:Mama Cat and I added up the bills and my two stays at hospital last winter, including my two surgeries and everything else, cost around $1MM. Can't IMAGINE what it would cost if I was in California at the time. Insurance paid for all but about $3500.

Perusing the itemized bills, we found outrageous charges such at $49 for two extra-strength Tylenol - something I had every day in my second stay for the incision infection. Ambien for sleep - $44 per tablet. Every saline flush of my IV - $60 - and I must had 10-12 a day. Home nurse told me that her employer buys the saline-filled syringes for $40/gross.
One ambulance ride was $1790. Second one, hours later, was $19,000! Yep, had decent insurance and glad to be alive, but, something's wrong.

And, then.....the second hospital came after us for $7000 more in "unpaid" charges. Pushed back and said insurance was supposed to pay for those. They hmmmmed and hahhhhed and eventually dropped it, but not after calling every two days for payment. Ended up charging insurance after all, after they tried to get us to fork it over. Later found out that the health system to which this hospital belonged was notorious in Minnesota for its relentless pursuit of patient money and unsavory practices in doing so.

I believe it. When I was hospitalized last November, it was a $30,000 bill. I paid a total of $500 and 10 months after all of that, I received a bill for $25 from some doctor that I never met, claiming he visited me.

Cluck U wrote:

Ibanez wrote: I agree, hospital prices are astronomical and it's completely unacceptable that they don't provide a "menu" of the charges. It's arbitrary and they can get away with it b/c medical attention is necessary.

No worry, Obamacare addresses those issues in Section 786, Subsection 389.28, paragraph 87, in the sentence that begins and ends with:

YOU'RE ALL F*CKED.

















Oh, and Death Panels will help decide what kind of medical attention is "necessary, " and for whom.

I read that section...and then cried.

ASUG8 wrote:

D1B wrote:
Boilerplate conk bullshit. You should be ashamed, you fucking asshole.

I'll add in rising obesity (stroke, heart attacks, high blood pressure) and diabetes rates as well as the aging of the baby boomers just so you feel better.

On this, I agree.

You and Ballsey however will be first to condemn the First Lady for battling obesity and other efforts to force needed change.

kalm wrote:

Ibanez wrote:
No shit. That's the point. These people are paying $3k for a few stitches and the question is are they insured?

I agree, hospital prices are astronomical and it's completely unacceptable that they don't provide a "menu" of the charges. It's arbitrary and they can get away with it b/c medical attention is necessary.

Ding, ding, ding! Hospitals will charge whatever they can get because a majority of consumers don't actually pay that amount and in many cases theirs a lack of competition. Free market insurance fail...

Grammar fail, but nevertheless...

If you think there is a "free market" in the medical insurance industry, you're being just as ignorant in this thread as Cappy.

D1B wrote:

ASUG8 wrote:
I'll add in rising obesity (stroke, heart attacks, high blood pressure) and diabetes rates as well as the aging of the baby boomers just so you feel better.

On this, I agree.

You and Ballsey however will be first to condemn the First Lady for battling obesity and other efforts to force needed change.

Why would I be against someone campaigning for fewer fatasses in 'Merica? It costs me as much as anyone else to take care of all their avoidable issues.

Baldy wrote:

kalm wrote:
Ding, ding, ding! Hospitals will charge whatever they can get because a majority of consumers don't actually pay that amount and in many cases theirs a lack of competition. Free market insurance fail...

Grammar fail, but nevertheless...

If you think there is a "free market" in the medical insurance industry, you're being just as ignorant in this thread as Cappy.

Brother Baldy, again, backed into a Conk corner, flailing......

ASUG8 wrote:

D1B wrote:
On this, I agree.

You and Ballsey however will be first to condemn the First Lady for battling obesity and other efforts to force needed change.

Why would I be against someone campaigning for fewer fatasses in 'Merica? It costs me as much as anyone else to take care of all their avoidable issues.

I support, 100%, anyone who tries to lose weight or help curb the Obesity epidemic in America. Obesity creates many health problems. I'm not saying all skinnies are healthy, but I'd bet you have less skinny diabetics with gout and cholesterol problems.