Bill came from the Mayo Clinic, whose ER I visited a few weekends ago at the urging of my doctor’s office. You may recall the flashing lights: possible detached retina, possible pending blindness. Off to the ER.
The Mayo has made itself into an avatar of efficiency. Literally — this is not an exaggeration — I got in there and out in 20 minutes. The doctor, who was not an eye specialist, spent a good 7 or 8 minutes with me. He turned off the lights in the room, shined a light into my eye and peered in there, said he couldn’t see any sign of bleeding and therefore believed I did not have a detached retina, and advised me to call a specialist the first thing Monday morning.
For this, the Mayo is billing Medicare, my Medigap insurer, and me over $900!
And they did almost nothing.
No joke. They checked me in, they sent this guy in, and they said good-bye.
Damn. If I could charge that much, I’d earn $2,700 an hour.
One of my daughters had four stitches put in the top layer of skin on the back of one of her fingers a couple of years ago. It was after 8 PM so we had to go to the emergency room. $1600 for less than two minutes work by the doctor… What was amazing was that they charged for complex diagnosis. The janitor could have figured that one out! I tried to appeal but the charges were all done through a company in another state, and the emergency room doctor was hired from out of the area on a temporary basis, so it seemed impossible to appeal
Bizarre. And frustrating!
The cost of medical care dumbfounds me. …almost as much as the billing for said medical care. I take a look at my Dad’s bills and blows my mind with all the codes and discounts and add-ons. My Dad sees his regular Doc once every 90 days and charges like $250…but medicare knocks it down to like $38 and then the “gap-insurer” picks up most of it. I guess that +$210 goes to “money heaven”…I also am alarmed at how detached Docs are from reality. Recently Mother needed eye drops …went to pharmacy….$299! …for like .10 of an ounce…Called the Doc and explained what the cost was and was there an alternative. There was….for….$10….Are you kidding me!!!
It’s also exceptionally revealing that when you tell a doc that you’re going to pay out of pocket she’s likely to give you a significant discount, and suddenly all that wacko paperwork dissolves into the air like some kind of sorcerer’s spell being lifted.
Years ago I had one of the early MSA’s. It had something like a $2,000 deductible. My gynecologist said that the burden of the paperwork and the hassle of trying to get insurance companies to pay was so great that she would give me a huge discount if I would pay in cash — don’t recall how much it was, but it was very significant. She was pleased when I agreed to this, and when I went in to get the usual female exams, the price was very reasonable. I had no problem paying it out of pocket.
It’s the whole complicated, obscene infrastructure that we’ve built around the scheme to inject insurance companies into the payment of medical bills. These megacorps come between the patient and the doctor, they apparently make doctors’ lives miserable, and the complications they create make billing incomprehensible to the patient.
One of my friends quit her psychiatric therapy practice to go to work for a big social service company because it was so much hassle and it took so long to get Cigna, the main insurer for her patients, to pay up. She said she couldn’t wait months and months to be paid.