01 Sep 2006
Expensive Care

This little tale hit pretty close to home. The bills have started arriving for my Mom's "minor thingy", and they are nothing short of amazing themselves.

For the initial "event", on Monday night, she was taken two blocks from her apartment to the local hospital in an ambulance, looked over in the emergency room by a doctor and kept there for roughly two hours while they gathered the paperwork to send 25 miles to the Indiana Heart Center in an ambulance. That's all she's gotten paperwork for so far, but just that first evening generated a bill of $10,800.

As I suspected, there's not going to be anything minor about the financial impact of this thingy. Now, the taxpayers Medicare picks up the tab, to be sure, and I'm grateful that my mom's not dead of her thingy, but still ... healthcare is turning into the Blob, and it's going to eat us all for lunch if we can't figure out how to get it under control.

How to run up a $17,000 hospital tab without actually being sick.

(link) [Seattle Weekly]

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07:02 /Politics | 2 comments | permanent link