SF hospital charged $15K ‘trauma response fee’ for baby that needed no treatment

My 14 month old son got a deaseae in the spine so he could not walk anymore.

We spent 4 weeks in the hospital. 1 week until it was diagnosed in the MRT, 3 weeks with 3 different antibiotic treatment and another two month antibiotics at home.

All this while my wife continued to study for her PHD so I stayed away from work and lived with my son in the hospital.

This whole experience did cost us around 200€ (incl. gasoline to drive to the hospital) while still getting full income from my employer.

She goes to the local vendor, they tell her to pick out whichever machine she'd like. She would rent it for a few months to make sure she liked it. The insurance company would pick up the bill.

Many months later we just got a bill for $500.

She calls them. They tell her that this is the balance owed on the machine. Now they've already billed the insurance company four thousand dollars for the machine. The insurance company paid about a quarter of that. Then she the rents on top of that. And now they want the balance. The bill came completely out of the blue.

They won't take it back. So she's thinking about selling it. Going online the machine is only worth 500 bucks brand new. They're basically selling the same machine three different times: once to the insurance company, once on a rent-to-own deal, and once as a bill coming from nowhere.

I don't know in what universe this is not considered plain old fraud. The billing situation in healthcare in the U.S. has become so byzantine and complicated that's it has basically turned into a shell game of screw-the-consumer.

I don't want to talk about why it happens. I don't want to talk about solutions. I will say that the politics of healthcare has led us here -- nothing else but that. And the more we argue the worst it will continue getting. I do want to note that it seems like every month or so there's some new horror story. It's so bad that the vast majority of the time nobody talks about it. It's an awful mess.

So what do you do when you get this bill? You can't pay, you don't have the money. What do you do?

The triage activation assembles a team of experts that treats every emergency patient with the same high level response, similarly because doing so attracts a higher fee.

So what's the plan then? Obviously, nobody will actually be capable of paying those costs. Will people simply choose to die, or leave untreated most medical issues? Even in the case in the article's title, how could any non-billionaire justify paying such a cost? They don't even live here -- I could never imagine what sort of calculus would lead me to even pay a single dollar to someone requesting such an obscene price for so few services rendered.