Medical Billing OMG!

If you have been following closely you are expecting me to blog about writing my Will this time. HOWEVER I felt compelled to share some information I reviewed on Friday regarding my cardiac ablation.

I had the procedure on December 19th and as of Friday had not received any sort of bill or statement. I decided to login into my health insurance portal and poke around to see what I could find. There lurking under “recent billing” I found several statements related to the procedure. One was from the physician’s group, another from anesthesia and another from some third party pre-op group ( I have no idea who that was) but those totals were reasonable and all paid by my insurance. But then I saw the hospital’s bill. Guess. I want you to think about how much they “billed” for 24 hours of observation and my cardiac ablation. This is considered outpatient. Do you have a number? $25K? $50k? $100K? Nope. It was $133,000!!! That is more than $5,000 PER HOUR of my stay. More than double the US median household income. I am going to request the detailed statement because I am very curious to know the breakdown especially since I was sleeping for at least 8 of those hours.

Before you set up a gofundme…I have good insurance. The negotiated rate was $47,000 and my responsibility was $3,000 ( I have gap insurance to cover that as well). To be clear; I am not whining about my insurance or obviously my share of the costs. BUT I am shocked that we have a health care system that allows billing of $133k or even $47k for an outpatient procedure. A procedure BTW that only has about a 70% success rate of working the first time for someone with my diagnosis. A person without insurance could not afford this procedure and would just slip into cardiac decline. My medical care this year alone between the testing, meds, cardio version (the shock) and cardiac ablation was over $150,000. I am incredibly grateful I can access quality care and have the ability to afford good insurance but am reminded of the millions of people in the US that remain uninsured or painfully underinsured. We have all heard that health crisis drive many US families into bankruptcy and every one if us has seen a health care related gofundme pop up on our news feed. Can you imagine having to ask social media for help to stay alive? It is an incredibly sad trend and statement about our current approach to health care in the US.

It does seem that the demand for universal health care has some traction, especially among younger voters so I am hopeful. But it makes me crazy when I hear people screaming about socialism being a slippery slope when many of them are happily collecting social security or medicare. The US has the means to ensure that all of our people have good medical care…but overall we seem to be lacking the will. We merely have to look at any number of other industrialized nations to see template for success. Take the best parts from each and launch our own health care system that leaves no one behind. We can do better.

Ugh. I’m all worked up right now so I better go. I haven’t decided how political I want to be in this blog. So for now I pause on this issue and we will get back on track next post. Just a teaser…tune in for my next post and see if you made it in the Will. Ha!