Re:A Kid, a Minor Bike Accident and a $19,000 Medical Bill
by true_religion on Sunday December 06, 2020 @10:41AM
(#25324187)
I don’t really know what to say except that your experience doesn’t match mine.
I could look up research articles on best practices but I often find that those things just pay lip service to what we are “supposed” to do and not what actually happens.
Also I take exception to this notion that unless your country has economic power in the top 20 of the world, then whatever practices you have has no value.
Extreme specialization is a byproduct of rich economies but that shouldn’t be confused with it being a good practice in all cases.
Neither are found in a normal first aid kit.
> I would bet that you can legally use it at home
No, suturing is a surgical procedure.
> this work was probably done by a nurse with a 2 year degree
I'm not a medic, but from what I can gather online, suturing is considered an advanced specialised skill for nurses.
> If the kid were at summer camp, they would have probably had the staff nurse do it.
I doubt it, even with a qualified nurse on site. No summer camp wants a reputation for being reluctant to take injured children to the emergency room, neither do they want liability.
> Emergency rooms are both overkill for this
Does any first-world country agree with you on this? As far as I'm aware suturing is always treated this way, it's not just for-profit medicine and artificial gatekeeping.
> We are all talking as if the hospitals performed a dangerous complex procedure and saved the kids life
It's routine emergency medicine. Nothing more, nothing less.
> If so, then isn’t 19,000 a small price to pay?
No, it's absurdly inflated.
> If not (and it’s a simple task as I believe) then why did they charge so much?
Because they could. There's a deep power imbalance at play. You can't go price-shopping when your child needs emergency treatment. You might know going in that medical expenses are the top cause of personal bankruptcies in the USA, but you can't haggle. You won't even know what you owe until after the fact.
Brits like myself are generally horrified at the way American medicine is run. This kind of thing simply doesn't happen in the UK. (That's not to say our healthcare system is perfect, of course.)