The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that led his wife to avoid ER

Re:The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that le... by blntechie on Saturday November 20, 2021 @08:10AM (#29287768)

Distinctive thing I found in the US is that hospitals are always big and do everything under one roof. There are some smaller clinics run by chains in some states but they operate primarily only for insurance money and are not common. At the bottom of the chain, some doctors run their own operations from a strip mall like place but they again provide very minimal service.

Meanwhile, in developing countries, it's not that hard to find a decently qualified doctor running his own small clinic with couple of nurses in a busy street. And to the next level, there is always a small 20-bed hospital around with 3-4 doctors and a bunch of nurses. And options keeps increasing in size and cost from small to the big hospitals like you typically see in the US. Almost 95% of primary healthcare are met by these small-mid level operations and people go to the big hospitals only for complicated surgeries and intensive care.

In this example of just 6 stitches, it probably would have been administered by a nurse in a 20-bed hospital for fraction of the cost of a big hospital.

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Re:The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that le... by Semaphor on Saturday November 20, 2021 @09:11AM (#29288216)

> Distinctive thing I found in the US is that hospitals are always big and do everything under one roof.

It’s the same in Germany, so I’m not sure that actually is what makes things different.

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Re:The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that le... by blntechie on Saturday November 20, 2021 @10:14PM (#29293873)

Germany is public-private healthcare insurance driven healthcare model compared to the pure play private insurance or out-of-pocket driven healthcare model in the US and other poor countries. Germany has statutory public insurance while the examples I’m quoting including the US don’t have any such. For a private driven healthcare system, it’s strange there are no smaller, cheaper and nimble competitors.

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Re:The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that le... by dragonwriter on Saturday November 20, 2021 @10:21PM (#29293920)

> the US and other poor countries.

the US is not a poor country, it is an astonishingly rich country whose elites want poor (and working-class more generally) people insecure so as to maximize the degree to which they can be exploited via economic coercion.

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Re:The ER charged him $6,589.77 for 6 stitches, cost that le... by blntechie on Saturday November 20, 2021 @10:29PM (#29293965)

Of course the US is not a poor country. Sorry if my sentence structure meant that way. The US is in a special cohort when it comes to healthcare where rest in the group are all developing or under developed countries.

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