I wonder what kind of innovations we're missing in the EU with our affordable healthcare.
That's still far more than you'd pay for most healthcare related things across the EU.
Getting access to emergency life-saving treatment, which leverages billions of dollars in research & development and hours of work from a team of doctors, radiologists, nurses, pharmacists, support staff, etc in exchange for being asked to contribute back to society by cooking burgers for a month feels like a pretty amazing offer compared to how almost all humans have existed in history and most still do around the world today.
With a broken limb (which is presumably why you required the X-ray in the first place)?
Sure, if you don't pay for rent, food, or transportation to work.
Hospital prices in the US are always lies; his insurance company probably paid around $10k in total and perhaps even less than that. Of course the insurance company doesn’t generally tell their customers exactly how much they actually paid the hospital. He could have gotten a more reasonable bill by asking the hospital for the cash price for everything, writing them a check for that amount, and then getting reimbursed by his insurance company. It might still have been more than his out–of–pocket limit, in which case he still would have paid the $2,500.
But his real mistake was probably going to the hospital in the first place. He probably should have gone to his Primary Care Physician or to an Urgent Care Clinic. Either one of them can admit him to a hospital if it turns out to be necessary, but it probably would not have been. I see in another comment that he needed an X–Ray, a CT scan, and some medication. He could have gotten all of that at an urgent care clinic for $1,000 or so, and slept in his own bed that night.
It pays to shop around, and you can do so _before_ you get hurt.
Finally, don’t forget that in addition to the $2,500 he paid, he also paid his insurance company even in years that he wasn’t injured or ill. Likewise, you pay taxes every year and part of that goes to pay for healthcare, even if you aren’t actually injured or ill.
However, when you are getting an x–ray to diagnose a medical problem, you do want more than just the image itself. You want the person who takes the x–ray image to be practiced and able to reliably take the correct image with the correct camera settings and so on. But most importantly, you want the diagnosis to come from a highly educated doctor who knows what your insides are actually supposed to look like. Whether these two roles are handled by one person or multiple, you are monopolizing someone’s time. You can’t really expect them to take x–rays of multiple patients at the same time, or to look at two x–rays and diagnose them both simultaneously.
If it takes the imaging tech 10 minutes to set up the x–ray machine for you and make the images the doctor asked for, then you have to pay 10 minutes of that tech’s salary. If the doctor spends 20 minutes asking you questions about your injury and then 10 more minutes looking at the images and telling you that you will live, then you’re going to have to pay for half an hour of their salary. The staff at the front desk who hand out forms and answer phones get a slice. The nurses who do most of the grunt work get a cut too.
The shoe salesmen didn’t directly charge for use of the x–ray fitting machines, but they did recoup their costs out of the shoe sales. Either by increasing the price of every pair of shoes by a small amount, or just by selling additional shoes (due to the novelty factor, or because it genuinely saved time allowing them to sell more shoes in a day).
The bulk of the price of any good or service comes from paying the people.
Well sure, that's why they were saying the price should be capped at a pair of shoes, not literally free.
And while a few minutes of a doctor's time costs more than a salesman, the entire materials costs of the shoes goes away. It seems like a reasonable benchmark.
But if you go to a hospital to get the same thing you will pay 10× as much or more. You’ll also have to wait a lot longer, as anyone with a more serious complaint will get prioritized ahead of you. Both of these are reasons why people should not generally visit the hospital, unless they have a problem which is immediately life–threatening, or they are admitted to the hospital by their primary–care physician.
> why should having minor health complications be synonym to bankruptcy in the richest country in the world?
It’s not. For all of the problems that our health–care system may or may not have, people don’t go bankrupt because they needed an x–ray.
Well, most x-rays are free here in Australia I believe, thanks to Medicare, so that "higher cost of living" explanation seems not to be right.
I've since had it again, but was more aware of what to feel for and didn't seek out the ER. Might be worth it to keep in mind if you have something similar again.
It is a hard balance but sometimes when I see people doing stupid things that land them in the ER, I kind of wish that their premium would increase as a result. That said, I think the largest cost in healthcare is the care of the elderly: We somehow keep people breathing for much longer than 50 years ago but it doesn't stop their bodies needing some big maintenance or long-term residential care.
Those fees are crazy nonetheless.
I don't have any insurance and during the last 1.5 years I suffered symptomatic Covid (medicines and vaccines free), then a road accident with multiple fractures: left arm, right shoulder, both wrists and L4, (nearly 2 months hospitalized plus long rehab to learn to walk again: all free excluding the fees for printing the medical data, which were over 400 pages, and MRI/RX/CT images DVDs: around 20 Euros all included), then last January I got a heart attack and was hospitalized in a coronary care unit for 4 days plus 1 day at the ward where I was planted two stents: again all free including the 1st bag of medicines.
20 years ago I worked in the IT, pays were very good and therefore taxes were high, but all considered, in the end I got a lot more than I paid for. I could think of a thousand things I don't like at all about my country, but healthcare is definitely not one of them.
He also built an x-ray machine, but his charges per the article were for a CT scan and staying at the hospital. A CT scan is a totally different beast than an x-ray machine, and staying at the hospital means you’re actively under medical care the entire time. It’s all very clickbaity.
European counties impose stringent controls on how much money their public health system will pay for something and in response, since said company still wants that money, it ends up jacking up rates in the US.
I don't imagine it would come anywhere close to the cost we currently pay for services here though.
It's the same as university here in the states. If colleges know that students are walking in with a minimum of $45k, guaranteed from the federal government, why wouldn't a university charge anything less than that for a degree?
https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/subsidized...
I really don't recall how much I borrowed versus the interest accumulation, but when I refinanced it a year after graduation I borrowed nearly $120k to do it. The early loans (from 2011) were 8% and I think the interest dropped to ~5% for the ones my senior year. I didn't have the money to pay for it directly and neither did my parents considering they had to put 3 kids through school and we lived near the bay area in CA.
Admittedly, I'm a bad example for loan burden because I went into tech and was able to pay them off in 5 years while living comfortably, but the take away is that unless you go into one of the wealthiest professions in the US, the cost is ridiculously high. Sadly, there are plenty of professions important to society which require a ton of education but just aren't that lucrative financially. We're putting pressure on people not to enter those fields.
The other thing that doesn't make sense to me is that after high school you are legally considered an adult. Why should your parents' financial situation have any effect on was kind (if any) aid you get? Say you have a bad relationship with your family, what then?
When I walked into a kaiser urgent care last year for serious back pain I had chest X-rays and a CT and I paid $20.
The major issue is that you only get that kind of healthcare working for a decent company (and using an HMO plan). Not everyone has the access and that's the issue.
If you're in an area where Kaiser's hospitals are, non-Kaiser hospitals will generally work with Kaiser. It's not like you get to choose which one you go to in an emergency. Outside of the states that Kaiser is in, you're usually fine but there are many horror stories about hospitals asking for fees beyond what Kaiser will cover under their global ER coverage.
First of all, yeah, the US system is pretty atrocious.
But healthcare in the EU means months of waiting in line or outright told to look somewhere else as they're full, cheapest procedures with no alternative, having to quite literally beg for prescription medicine that worked for you before but the new doctor doesn't want to give you, tons of preferential treatment and discrimination.
Let's be real here, the only good thing in the EU is emergency care, when you break your arm or something. Good luck with any non-life threatening problems and mental healthcare.
I mean, sure, many people have it easy, living in the good part of a country. But I'm not the only one who has experienced what can only be called absolute horseshit. Reddit is full of such threads.
But "muh affordable healthcare".