Hacker News Reader

Comment by MajorLOL | Hacker News Reader

You have reframed the argument! To use your analogy; You didn't have a flat tire, you had a bent frame!

A collision specialist will charge a greater rate for services than a local tire shop because; the tooling is greater and the staff skill levels are greater.

>two thousand dollars? And that's AFTER insurance, by the way

You never mentioned that this was after insurance. If your bill was vastly more than $2,000 - I can agree that we have a cost issue (stemming from insurance interference in the marketplace).

View on HN

Oh you're right, I should've told my wife to calm down with her gasping for air until the morning when I could take her to a more wallet friendly clinic.

I can't tell if you're clinging to this argument out of pride or if you're just deliberately refusing to understand what "emergency" care is for some reason. Maybe you haven't had the experience of dialing up a significant other's parents to let them know what's going on and which hospital you're going to in the middle of the night, but let me tell you that planning out which hospital was going to screw us the least in the pocketbook was NOT in the forefront of my mind.

Edit: Full disclosure, this was the best case scenario: In network hospital and everything. I research this stuff ahead of time for this exact reason. The insurance company only covers 60% of the visit until I spend something like $4,500. When you make under $40k, $2,000 might as well be $4,500 might as well be a million dollars, it DOESN'T MATTER because it's still going to ruin you for a long time.

>$2,000 might as well be $4,500 might as well be a million dollars

I can only imagine how silly you are trying to be!

The thing is, medical bills in the US are blown out of all proportion, and have nothing to do with actual costs.

This has been well documented and studied time and again.

It's not like Sweden or Denmark have much worse hospitals or doctors -- on the contrary, even a crappy US hospitalization will cost you several times more than what it would cost you there.

Heck, I was taken into a first class private hospital in an (advanced) Asian country, stayed there for the night, was taken care of by 4 nurses, had several exams/tests made, was consulted by 2 doctors, oh, and they even got me there by ambulance after a friend called (I had fainted atm).

I expected the worst, but the next day I was asked to pay something amounting to $50 -- without even having an insurance coverage (as I was just visiting).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com