Quote:
Originally Posted by August
It was itemization of expenses from the insurance company, (along with a bill for 1k which was my deductible).
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Yeah, they do that, but the amount actually collected was likely less. How much less I cannot say, and it would still be a HUGE amount of money, even if it was "merely" 60% of 70k, lol.
I know that the government hospital here has an abysmal collection %, though. My wife's old dept was 17%. No kidding.
So they bill $100,000, and collect on average $17,000. So everyone that actually pays needs to roungly pay 5 times what they should to make up for the losses. Then 70k doesn't look that bad, as it's 12k, which is not unreasonable.
I know a guy who is a radiology tech. He told me there is some drug they use in the scanner (dunno what it was, perhaps to calm people down). It comes in a glass bottle with several doses inside. Even though new needles are used for each patient at all times, they are not allowed to use the same bottle for 2 people. So you open the lid, fill the syringe, give 1 dose, or sometimes 2 if there is a lot of waiting, then throw the other 3-4 doses in the trash! Of course the jar is a couple hundred bucks or something like that. Waste!
Heck, at our house we use surgical scrub towels as dish towels. And I have various medical instruments in my tool box (hemostats, etc). Wife liberates them from the OR. She goes in and needs to do something really simple. There is a "tray" of stuff that is presterilized and wrapped. The nurse grabs the kit for whatever, and she might use ONE item on the tray to do what she needs to do. The rest gets thrown in the trash. While designed to be disposable, the trays are NOT cheap. So sometimes she'll bring me an unused tool that would otherwise be thrown away, or she'll grab the scrub towels that were unused and we have new dish towels. A lot of this has come about because of defensive care. On the off chance that somethign might get used twice, then they get sued, they just use everything once and throw it away.