Re:Medical equipment pricing is completely broken when a sli...
by kwhitefoot on Saturday September 14, 2019 @12:22PM
(#20971797)
USD 900 for an ER visit is a horror story too. Where does someone without savings get that kind of money from? At least it seems difficult for many: https://money.cnn.com/2018/05/22/pf/emergency-expenses-house...
I don't live in the US and I'm not American so perhaps I'm missing some information.
Re:Medical equipment pricing is completely broken when a sli...
by com2kid on Saturday September 14, 2019 @03:07PM
(#20972995)
It needs to be fixed, but a $900 average that includes $200 charges for a $25 "medical boot" and charges for a $30 bandaid sounds like it may be not too hard to reduce costs across the entire board.
If the average ER visit was 5K of unknown miscellaneous charges than that would indicate nationwide maliciousness on the part of nearly all hospitals. If only a small # of hospitals are engaging in that level of unfair billing, then they can possibly be investigated one by one.
It is the same thing as "we have thousands servers that are crashing at random multiple times a day" versus "we have a bunch of servers that are low on RAM, and a couple servers that crash 5 times a day."
Neither scenario is good to be in, but it is possible to get a hand on the latter scenario, while in the first scenario a "burn it all down and rewrite" fix might be appropriate.
The OOP is still averaging under 300, again, not the horror stories in this thread.
Problems exist, but it seems that only a small % of providers are horribly abusing the system.
(of course a small % across over 300 million people is still a lot of harm!)