Well, I was doing okay with the doctor charging me $5500 dollars an hour for an hour and half operation, but today I got the hospital bill and I am frankly disgusted and outraged. Come on, $8000 dollars for a metal rod and 6 screws! $7600 for anesthesia,
$2300 for drugs and pharmacy which I barely used! They say the problem is the insurance companies, I disagree, it is the providers, and while the insurance companies may be the enablers of this insanely cost bloated medical system, to me it feels like an ethical (or lack there of) decision on the part of those providing the services to charge these enormously inflated fees. Well, if I don't qualify for the financial support this may be the straw, or more like the elephant, that breaks my financial back. With our house upside down, me not getting any traction on my credit card debt and now this I see little reason to hold on anymore and believe I will somehow pull a rabbit out of my magic hat and start moving forward. Add to that the recession is killing both my art career and my long established carpentry business. I am just flummoxed by how one group of people taking care of our essential medical needs charge amounts that we by doing our work that make their world possible can't pay them for their services. It has been said before, but something is terribly wrong with the medical system. I heard one story where a bicyclist crashed her bike in the middle of nowhere, an innocuous not that out of the ordinary kind of activity. She broke her pelvis and had to be medi-vaced out with a helicopter. A reasonable fee for a couple of hours work? $3,000? $5,000 maybe. No, $38,000 just to get her to the hospital. What was the profit margin on that I wonder? So at this point this broken leg cost $35,084.00. The good news is if I had been paying health insurance for the past 30 years, (since Medi-cal was gutted by Reagan) I am still ahead. That would have cost me $75,000.00 at least, and I still would have with a $10.000 dollar deductible, be owing $25,000. Maybe it is time to pack it in move to a civilized country?
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I don't know what to tell you, except, I KNOW what you're going through with pain and with medical bills. My helicopter ride was $10,624 from hospital to hospital -- about 55 miles if you drove by the roads (which they did not). MRI's are 5K plus.
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