If We Had A Medical Section I'd Put This In It

[Rev. Rye]

Sometime back I mentioned that I had spent a night in a hospital for “observation.”  The Yanks on the board will understand this so the information is principally being given to residents of more civilized nations which have National Health Care systems of one type or another.  Now, I am on Medicare so out of all of this my total cost was $80 in co-pays.  The total billed was $16,558.00.  Medicare had the good sense to tell them to go fuck themselves but even they paid $3,079.68.  I can only assume that the purpose of even issuing such outrageous bills is to create some sort of write-off of the difference.
 
So here is a representative sample of some of the charges on the statement.
“Critical Care – First Hour”  $5,344.70.  As near as I could tell this “critical care” consisted of parking my ass on a gurney and attaching a clothespin type sensor to my finger which was connected to a monitor which beeped constantly and annoyingly.  At some point a doctor walked in and talked to me for a little while but that was a separate charge of $802.00.
 
Now much of their jargon is incomprehensible but I was able to use the web to figure out that a TTEw/Doppler was an echocardiogram.  It took about a half hour and cost $1,982.30 as far as the hospital was concerned.  Medicare said “Fuck off.”  Next I figured out that a drug they gave me was something called Lovenox.  When I went on Google for the cost of Lovenox there were people who were outraged that it cost $55.00 per shot and at least one shot was needed everyday.  That would be a minimum of $1,600 per month for those people.  My one shot of Lovenox was billed at $552.00.  Again, Medicare was unimpressed! 


The last obvious basis for comparison was an EKG which, when done at the doctor’s office cost $17.10.  In the hospital, it was $489.20 and they did it twice.

Obviously these amounts are meaningless for Medicare patients.  If you have private insurance you are sort of at the mercy of whatever the insurance company is able to negotiate.  BUT, if you don’t have insurance, you are financially fucked flat by an “observational” one night stay in a hospital where they didn’t really do much of anything except annoy the piss out of me all night and make sure that I didn’t get any sleep.

Don’t let any politician tell you that the “private sector” can do it better.

I recently completed a bookkeeping certificate, so I'll try to put my two cents in. Markups are fairly normal, often to cover the cost of overhead, stuff the buyer doesn't pay for in raw material, but still needs to be paid. That said: GOOD FUCKING GOD, WHAT THE HELL IS A MARKUP LIKE THAT SUPPOSED TO BE PAYING FOR? While I haven't gotten my bookkeeping job yet, I strongly suspect that, if I were in a position where I had to do accounts like that, I'd seriously consider reporting the company to the SEC.