My goodness Clare! $8,000 seems to me EXTREMELY excessive and he did not even stay overnight! Did you receive an itemized bill?

Carol

Holy cow!! I don't know how you guys do it in the U.S.

Those CAT scans are expensive.
Talk to a social worker at the hospital....they usually negotiate bills.

susan_on Holy cow!! I don't know how you guys do it in the U.S.

My thoughts exactly

Clare, if after talking to the social worker at the hospital like Monica suggested, and if they won't lower it, just make $50.00 a month payments. They can't do anything to you because your making an effort. It'll just take a while. That's how my sister does it.
Leslie

Thank heavens for MCP!! It wouldn't cost us a cent for all of those tests.

Hospital bills are negotiable when you are uninsured or underinsured.

It doesn't seem right, how much it costs for only 4 hours.
I've had some doosy medical bills lately too. LOL, it makes me sick again.

Get an itemized bill, review it and ask if these tests were necessary. Remember many Doctors and other medical staff are asking for way too many tests because they have been ( and still are) being sued because if the person gets sicker or passes away, the family yells NEGLECT???\

Then sit down with the hospital and review it step by step. and remember they knock off alot for people on medicare (because of overcharging) so they can do the same for people with little or no insurance.

That sounds like too much for just 4 hours! I would demand an itemized bill and see just what is on it. If nothing can be done I would pay by the month like Grammahony said.

Deb

"That sounds like too much for just 4 hours!"

It is NOT the length of time you spend in the ER that dictates what the bill will/should be. It's what is done to/for you during the time you are there. A CAT scan is very expensive - it could easily be over 1/2 of your total bill.

But, as has been said by others, talk to the folks at the hospital. They will more than likely lower the total for you, and you can make monthly payments.

How much of this amount will be covered by your COBRA insurance? It's horrible to get sick and feel you can't go for help.

Shirley

Have the rules for COBRA changed? It's been quite a while since I had anything to do with it but at that time the COBRA coverage was the same as your coverage thru your last employer. You continued to pay the premiums to your employer except you had to pay the full premium plus a nominal fee for employer costs to maintain it. There was no change in coverage.

I am electing the Cobra coverage too and it is supposed to be the same coverage I had through Jammer's employer.

It is amazing how much medical care costs now. I don't know how anyone without insurance makes it.

I agree about just making payments each month. Hopefully your insurance will cover most of the costs.

We have a insurance deductible of $3600, so at least don't have to pay the whole thing. But even the amount of the deductible is enough to give me heart pains! And we did get an itemized bill and just for the CT Scan it was close to $5000.

What really is icing on the cake is the charge of $360 for pain pills - which they forgot to give to us. They were suppose to hand us an envelope with a couple of them when we left but didn't. They called the next day to let us know that we could drive back and pick them up. DH didn't want to go back so we didn't. I would have if I had know they were going to cost us that much. I don't know if we can get the charge removed or not. It will be our word against theirs.

Hope everyone stays healthy out in KT land!
Clare

Anyone want to argue against nationalizing health care in the US after reading that? Ridiculous!

Clare,

Has this bill been submitted to your insurance company?
If so, this is the "retail" rate. The rate they wold like to get for those services.

If this is the bill that is sent to your insurance company, don't worry yet. The hospital probably has a negotiated rate for services with the insurance company, which is far less.
If your insurance coverage says that they must accept the negotiated rate...then the hospital can't charge you for the difference.
I would wait until I saw what the insurance company paid on this bill, and what the insurance company says is your debt, according to the contract.
Is your $3600 deductable for a year or incident?

Go by what your insurance says you owe the hospital...not the hospital.

A few years ago, a hospital tried to bill us the difference between what the insurance company paid, and what they billed.
Took me months, and a threat to report them to the insurance company and local TV stations for fraud.

They eventually erased the bill.

You say your deductible is $3600, are you then covered 100%? If so then your bill is only $3600, doesn't matter what the "bill" is you only pay your deductible. If it's the 3600 then 20% it's still "only", $4480..still much less than $8,000,,and that's IF you have to pay the "hospital rate" not the negotiated rate. I know it's still a lot, but better than $8K, just trying to look at the positive side.

Vickey-MN

Sherrmman who do you think pays for a national health care program...Do you think it will be cheaper and free? Also how long are you willing to wait for the surgery you might need.

Holy Cow is right! I don't know how you deal with that! I had a CT scan last year and it didn't cost me a cent. Just curious but those with good medical insurance in the US, what are your premiums like?
I can't imagine having to worry about paying like that when I go to the ER for something serious.

After DH's heart surgery, and aneurysm repair almost three years ago, we negotiated. You bet we negotiated! He had no insurance, not eligible for medicare yet, I had just retired and had yet to start drawing SS so had no income; his SS started a month before all the surgery.

The hospital and its various subsidiaries cut us a great deal of slack, but the surgeon and other independent agencies wouldn't budge. We were left with over $100,000 in bills, eight different ones. All of them are getting 25 or 50 dollars a month, so they will never collect all of "their" money but we will be paying for the rest of our lives.

Thank goodness we are naturally frugal people.

Ruthie, serious surgeries are performed immediately here. You only wait for elective and non emergency surgery. Two KT members have fairly recently had knee surgeries and so did a friend of mine here in Canada. My friend did not wait any longer for her surgery than our KT girls did. As to the cost, I do not think it's any more expensive here, when you take into consideration the premiums, deductibles and bills Americans seem to pay. There is another post here on the KT, I just posted more info about our system there. I think it's called "what do you pay".

Well, ruthie, we will all pay for national health care. Every one of us, through our taxes. What's wrong with that? We all pay for it now, one way or another, but some pay a whole lot more than others, and many of us have no regular health care at all. That is unconscionable in a modern nation, one that considers itself "the Best" in so many things. For Clare to have to pay $3600 for emergency treatment, or whatever they end up paying, is also unconscionable. And ridiculous. Because some people pay nothing for the same services, and others cannot receive those services because they have no insurance, and others have to spend their life savings to get treatment.

If you really want to talk about this, we should do it on another thread and not hijack this one.

When our GS was born 20 years ago, had to be airlifted to a larger hospital and was in the NICU for about 10 days, can't remember the bill but was atrocious.

When I went over the itemized bill they sent son, I was amazed that newborns used a couple packages of diapers or more daily, large pkgs. at that. I figure that his were being shared with neigboring babies and the stickers going on his chart. If it took 3 or 4 IV sets to start an IV, he was charged for them all, I think he should have been only charged for 1 each time an IV had to be restarted, not several.

Long story short, DS was working as a mechanic making minimum wage and the social worker at the hospital set up a payment plant for him and he agreed to it. Now, when the first bill arrived, his payment didn't even cover the interest on the bill!!! Yes, this hospital charged interest. He had to declare bankruptcy, there was no way he would have ever been able to pay that bill, it was getting larger every month. If they had taken the interest off he would have eventually have paid it off, would have taken years but he would have done so.

The other thread I referred to earlier is called "how does yours work?"

I think that you have been hit with a nasty practice done by several hospitals. When you don't have an insurance company standing between you and the hospital, they try to extract the maximum amount of cash. When caught at this game, they reply, "We need to recoup losses we incur for those non-paying patients we that have to accept."

Before you pay one cent, investigate what the true charges should he. You can not get the right answer from the hospital staff, because they will only parrot what the operations manual tells them to reply.

First contact your insurance agent and ask what are the reasonable charges, and what the hospital agreed to when they acepted your insurance. Most insurance companies have agreements with hospitals about what the insurance will pay and the amount the patient should pay for many standard procedures.

My wife and I had a run-in a year ago. Her doctor sent her to a local hospital to get an direct injection (into a vein) of an antibiotic. It was a normal procedure for his clinic, but being Saturday, his staff was out and he sent her to one of the hospitals in which he pactices.

We received a bill of $2200!!!. My wife blew her top (she had worked in a hospital for many years) and she called our insurance. Sure enough, it was a bogus bill. When the hospital was confronted with the information, they back pedalled trying to say that, yes, it was not a true bill, but was what their true cost was. Baloney! There was nothing on the bill indicating this was an informational bill and that a true billing would follow. I'm sure that they would have gladly accepted the money if we had written the check.

Our cost became $75 after the insurance paid their part.

Don't pay anything until the insurance company has paid their part and informed you of your share.

Thanks everyone. We will wait till the insurance sorts it out. That is why we are paying a ridiculous amount of $20,000 a year in premiums for it through COBRA. I think it has got to the point, with costs being as high as they are, that it is time to think about national health care.
Clare