Went to a PCP place today for a physical and while sitting in the waiting room for an hour past my appointment time (that’s not the healthcare USA #1 part) some guy showed up in dirty, low wage looking building contractor attire. His conversation went like this:
This dude: “I’m coming from the emergency room, I got electrocuted at work and they said I needed to go to my PCP and ask for a stress test or something cause they saw something with my heart.”
Reception: “Your PCP is here?”
This dude: “Yes, Dr XXXXX.”
Reception: “OK, who’s your insurance?”
This dude: hands reception a card
Reception: “OK, just a moment…” click click click click click… click click click… “They said a… stress test?”
This dude: “I think so?”
Reception: “OK…” click click click… “You said this happened at work?”
This dude: “Yes.”
Reception: “Oh, we’re not going to be able to do that here. We don’t work with worker’s compensation claims. You need to contact your worker’s comp representative for guidance.”
This dude: “My what? The ER told me to come here.”
Reception: “Yes but your injury occurred at work so you’ll need to contact your worker’s compensa…”
This dude, with the look of someone who is used to being denied service due to bureaucratic hoops he doesn’t have time for: “Forget it, I’m fine.” walks out
This dude will probably have a preventable heart attack within a year.
Guy breaks arm in sking accident and then overbills the guy. The wife is a coding specialist for a the guy’s practice and see that they upcharged him so she starts a year’s long saga to get the bill reduced. The article goes though their ordeal while giving tips on how to contest bills, but the conclusion made me a bit glum.
“I know it’s time-consuming. It is really taxing on our minds to do this,” Kalsariya said. “But if everybody makes that effort, then they have to be transparent.”
Just what you want to be doing after having a broken arm
yeah this is insane. you have to be a fucking expert AND spend hundreds of hours to even have a chance.
meanwhile, every fucking provider I deal with is creating their own “patient portal” which is just a whole new layer of labyrinths and bullshit for them to hide behind
Start thinking of your health insurance as a second job. If you already work two jobs don’t worry. Your insurance (if you have any) is probably dogshit that covers nothing anyway.
oh yeah, front desk people are fucking potatoes and are actually less than useful in 99.99% of cases, my comment was specifically in regards to billing/payments.
my favorite thing is when they send like 19 bills all within a week, I can’t remember if I already paid it or not, you go to the patient portal and it’s like “input nine thousand digit account number” and then they don’t actually show you a balance, it’s just “HOW MUCH YA GIVIN US, BITCH?”
One big problem is insurance companies don’t care about overpaying for treatment but instead welcome it because their profit taking is limited to 20% of what they spend on treatments.
Edit: also lol at thousands for a splint being the best possible outcome.
If it makes you feel better, probably not. I don’t see how you get from ‘electrical injury’ to ‘needs an outpatient stress test’ at all with any sort of urgency.
My favorite part is how the whole thing is framed as a victory for the victims, and an accident by the hospital. I’d love to see the data on how often they underbill versus overbill. I’m going to go out on a limb and go with 0% versus not 0%.
healthcare system could be the best in the history of mankind, based on wait times and successful procedures, and even life expectancy.
but that’s not how everyone experiences healthcare. everyone goes through life while their health generally declines, with more and more issues, which the science eventually can’t cure, and only manage.
We’re in the open enrollment period at work and my partner and I are considering changing our insurance, and it’s just a fucking awful experience all around. Trying to predict how much we’re going to pay next year is next to impossible, so instead we’ll probably stick with the cheapest high-deductible plan and then use that high deductible as an excuse not to go to the doctor (which, of course, is the system working as intended)
that’s a good initial metric because we all think of healthcare as something better done earlier than later. but there’s a logical trap there because it is much harder to compare outcomes without lots of data, eg with your own health prior in life, and the treatment given to people of similar age and problems even ten years ago.
Yup, we just did this and my wife works in insurance. It’s basically high deductible plan, which is less expensive and comes with $1,000 in an HSA, but the bills will just keep coming after an appointment, or a more expensive POS plan with new HSA contribution, but lots of the visits are just co-pays.
And not that I didn’t realize it before, but the whole thing is so rigged against the poor. My wife lost her job over the summer, so we were on a bare-bones marketplace plan for a little while until her new job’s insurance kicked in on October 1. My son needed care that wasn’t covered and it’s going to cost us $6,500. He’s getting some additional testing done that the new plan doesn’t cover (treatment would be, testing no) and that’s going to run us $4,000.
We can technically afford it, but it’s not comfortable. There’s no possible way most families in this country would be able to, which is terrible.
And then, for god knows what reason, it’s cheaper to pull up some code numbers with Single Care (like GoodRx) than to use insurance for our prescriptions. One of mine, for example, is one third of the price with Single Care and all I did was Google “prescription drug discount.” It’s so stupid.
