That's a shitty bill. It's also insane that US doctors and hospitals aren't required to post prices, keep prices reasonably within an allowed range, and are allowed to price gouge customers for however much they want without limit.<p>In Redding CA, I ran across a woman with a nasal infusion pump tube taped to her face in a coffee shop. She was hurriedly collecting paperwork for a hearing across the street. It turns out she was preparing to go through bankruptcy proceedings while she was dying from incurable Stage IV cancer. That the doctors and hospitals were vultures picking her life apart for money while she was dying but still alive and making her end-of-life as miserable as possible was adding insult to injury. Some hippocratic oath. More like hypocritical chisels out to monetize misery.<p>So when someone is out of money and dying in America, they are treated like criminals with court proceedings. At their hearing, they get a chance to justify their existence requires clothes, transportation, and housing while everything else goes to creditors.
> Tens of thousands of people each year receive a series of shots to prevent rabies after a possible exposure. It normally costs between $1,200 and $6,800. Not in this case.<p>Even that "normal" cost is absolutely crazy.
How is that legal? What is stopping the hospital from charging 200 million dollars for the rabies shots?<p>If I hired someone to fix my plumbing and they wouldn't give me an estimate and then decided to charge me $20k/hr I don't think a court would honor that contract.
The insurance company paid $58000 for the treatment? How the hell did they not get the hospital to get things fixed? My insurance made me submit proof, rejected it, submit proof again, partially approve, call them and then finally reimburse my $18 covid take home tests. But somehow they don’t do the same to hospitals?
I once dropped in to a hospital near Vacaville, maybe the same one.<p>There was a security guard at the front with a grey keypad. The would not speak to you unless you entered your Social Security Number. I made the mistake of entering it but thought nothing would happen because I didn't see any live human. Guess what? $800 bill for the pleasure of seeing exactly no service provider. This is how they work.
The funny part is that US people are paying more (2x) for public health (not private) than the average european and receiving nothing in return... And they say public healthcare is communism. That shot in my country would cost 0. Like a cancer treatment or giving birth. Just 0. That's why we pay taxes.<p>I'm glad I don't live in the US.<p><a href="https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compare-countries/#Health%20consumption%20expenditures%20per%20capita,%20U.S.%20dollars,%20PPP%20adjusted,%202021%20or%20nearest%20year" rel="nofollow">https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...</a>
Does anyone have advice on how to protect yourself from bills like this?<p>My insurance is fighting me on a $450 test (that I could have gotten done with an Amazon kit for $80).
I am so happy that I don't have to put up with crazy shit like $200k for a few shots which is NOT just a billing failure, just by not living on the other side of the Atlantic...<p>Because here where I live, if you walk into an emergency room and walk out a few hours later with two shots and a $200k bill, ... well it's unthinkable, but if it happened anyway and the hospital tried to defend it, the judge would just laugh their lawyers out of the door.
Absolutely insane that they would have been better off heading to SFO, walking up to the Air Canada or Aeroméxico counters, and leaving the country for care.
Brazil here. A few years ago, my wife was bitten by a dog. We simply went to the neighborhood free healthcare clinic, the standard entry point to our free universal healthcare system. After a very short wait they cleaned the wound and administered the first rabies vaccine. We went back there for the next doses. All free of charge, and the only "paperwork" she needed to do was to present her national ID card.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistema_%C3%9Anico_de_Sa%C3%BAde" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistema_%C3%9Anico_de_Sa%C3%BA...</a>
I'm not in the US, is medical tourism common amongst US citizens? For non-urgent cases, why not travel to a country that offers cheap, quality health care? Financially seems justifiable, given that in the US, simple treatments and medical procedures can cost many 000s without any transparency ahead of time.
Michael Moore made a movie on this topic. Barely anything changed except what's left of Obamacare.<p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386032/" rel="nofollow">https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386032/</a>
Probably a DFT^P03 message caused an issue somewhere...
Or this was to be...
"CDPH does not have a role in setting charge limits or ranges for services."
This is another of those cases which seem to be very clearly price gouging, which is illegal, unless you're a hospital.<p>The hospital should be subpoena'd to get the actual cost of treatment - both the vaccination, the amount paid to the ER staff during the time the patients were there, etc.<p>Also this BS where they can just say "out of respect for patient privacy we don't discuss billing matters", when the patient has provide explicit documentation and consent saying the hospital can discuss billing can also get shafted.
I needed rabies shots before I went to South America. The NHS doesn't cover the vaccine but they will stick it in your arm for free. So I spent £50 at a pharmacist for the three phials and the nurse at my doctor's surgery administered the first two. The last dose was due the day before I left but the nurse was off sick. So I rang another local surgery and the nurse there was happy to do the job. The American system baffles me.
Louis Pasteur is rolling in his grave. The 3 shot rabies PEP vaccine costs $108 while in the US it costs $1000. Same shit, American patients just receive the privilege of paying more.<p><a href="https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/rabies" rel="nofollow">https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/rabies</a>
So healthcare costs like 500-1k per month for the good stuff. And you still might have to pay through the nose for a £75 vaccine?<p>Or is this a case of bad insurance?<p>That the US can spy on the entire world but can't get its own people basic healthcare is shocking.
I encountered a bat many years ago acting erratically inside the house. It had evidently entered in my sleep.<p>I looked up the cost, and found out the household would be bankrupted by the shots and we would end up homeless. I calculated the danger from homelessness outweighed the risk of rabies. I guess the bet paid off, as we're now well past the 99th percentile of incubation period.
Agreed while this is excessive, many hospitals do this to cover the uninsured who don't pay their bills. Hospitals have to care for such patients due to EMTALA. Consequently many non-academic hospitals are under huge financial stress (<a href="https://www.kqed.org/science/1981588/half-of-california-hospitals-are-in-the-red-pandemic-troubles-pile-up-for-ers" rel="nofollow">https://www.kqed.org/science/1981588/half-of-california-hosp...</a>) and go after anyone that can pay to the point of bankrupting them. The US medical system is simply dysfunctional.
These sort of stories like these go viral. The amount paid is nowhere close to that, sometimes nothing is paid. The final price is always negotiated vastly lower. The patient often pays a tiny fraction of this. It's bad that this happens in the first place though. There is something wrong when people getting these outrageous bills in the first place. Hospitals send out these bills in the hope a tiny fraction of people pay in full.