Snakebite victm charged $89,000 for 18 hour stay.

Wow, And some of you argue with healthcare reform, albeit it is FAR from perfect. Here is an interesting article and it kind of cover why we NEED health insurance. Those of you who say "I never go to the dr, well you never know when you will need to and it could save your life. Hope you have insurance if something like this happens to you.

"We are required to give Medicare one level of discount from list price, Medicaid another, and private insurers negotiate for still others," officials told the newspaper. "If we did not start with the list prices we have, we would not end up with enough revenue to remain in operation."

The hospital added: "Our costs for providing uncompensated care are partially covered by higher bills for other patients."


news.yahoo.com...

reply to post by kurthall


If the victim was unlucky enough to have to go to any hospital other than the one in his narrow Obamacare policy ... then he could have to pay for the same bill. Oh, and snake antivenom might not be on his narrow Obamacare formulary.

reply to post by kurthall


Damn he got off easy. I had to pay 32k for 8 hours once.

Could we please get a link to the story?

Also, this kind of very unusual circumstances may not be the best example. Not being able to read the story, I would think it likely the anti-venom was very expensive, and there may have been ICU charges.

Story please?

ETA: Ok, thanks for the link.

According to the story, 81,000 was for the anti-venom, which the patient said he found on-line for 750/dose. (so about 4,000) First of all, I don't think I would be buying something like that over ebay. Secondly, after his insurance kicked in and paid its discounted amount of 20,000, the patients out-of-pocket was just over 5,000. Yes, still a large bill but I would think his life is worth that much. In any other country he likely might not have gotten the same treatment.

Obviously, our health care is messed up. Obamacare is only going to make this type of situation even worse. It is NOT the answer.

In Canada i would use that $89,000 and throw in another 10k to buy a Nissan GTR and drive all the way to hospital to get it treated for free.

TLDR; you guys need a good healthcare system.

reply to post by kurthall


The health insurance scam is the whole reason an 18 hour stay costs nearly 90k.

To state that stories like these are proof of the need for health insurance is laughable.

If the free market was regulating all health care like it does services not covered by insurance, a snake bite and 18 hour stay in the hospital would cost around 500 dollars(snake bite shot=200-300 bucks and then a bed to sleep in = 100-200 a night)

Health care is not that expensive.

Here is a wonderful and in depth look at the reasons healthcare sucks:

www.comedsoc.org...

And a video of a surgical center that has restored free market principles in their pricing strategies:

www.surgerycenterok.com...

They don't deal with insurance at all and put all of their prices up front. Notice how getting a pacemaker installed(serious surgery) only costs 11400.

That's what happens when the free market is restored even in small amounts to healthcare.

Here's a good interview with the man who runs that center:

reply to post by OrphanApology


Exactly, it's the middle men who are killing us, not the industry itself.

Look at the prices in elective cosmetic surgery which insurance does not touch. Those prices steadily come down for the most part and are reasonable for what you get.

Lasik was like until insurance started to pick it up.

reply to post by ketsuko


Well the new healthcare law seals in place the scam started by Nixon(health maintenance organization act of 1973).

It's sad and it's still surprising how many people support it, even seeing what a ripoff it is.



What's funny about the above clip is that Michael Moore then goes on to support the same system that this clip is alluding to. LOL. What an idiot.

reply to post by OrphanApology


What's really the saddest is that the whole health insurance thing was started as a response to wage controls in the '30s. Employers started offering it as a perk to lure in and retain employees since they couldn't offer more in salary. And guess who implemented those controls ...

Now, who has to "fix" the system those controls got started?

reply to post by kurthall


Hope He at least got to eat the snake!

Here in the UK, the cost of the treatment would have been free.

The irony is that we have no indigenous poisonous snakes.

reply to post by ketsuko


Well health insurance in it's original form isn't bad. It's just like any other insurance product. What's bad is the monster today called health insurance that is in no way an insurance product. The health maintenance organization act turned health insurance into a product that removed the consumers from the equation and left them without personal choices. It also added a million middle men and eventually became employer tied.

A complete disaster.

Traditional insurance is a high severity low frequency product that is bought prior to a calamity happening. Like car insurance for auto accidents.

The current insurance is a monster that exists because of laws that make it so.

It's a complete mess.

When you get a chance read the paper I posted. It goes into really great detail as to all of the issues.

This is one of the major reasons I supported Obama's healthcare reforms. SOMETHING needs to be done, but all we hear from the GOP is complaining. The republicans had 8 years to do something about healthcare, but instead they decided that those trillions of dollars would be better spent on pointless conflicts. Conflicts that made a lot of money for the already wealthy. Not to mention the blatant lie that took us into Iraq in the first place. And I won't even go into the fact that the day before 9/11 the government announced it had "misplaced" billions of dollars in military funds, but "coincidentall" the records were destroyed when the "plane" hit the Pentagon.

My point is basically that the republicans have zero answers, and have only served to make things worse for ordinary Americans, the lower and middle classes. All of this money that was wasted could have been used to reform healthcare, or at least spent bolstering the country in some way. So the right has no reason to be complaining, considering they didn't push any healthcare reform.

The truth of the matter is that something needed to be done, and the opposition we are seeing from the right is the EXACT same thing they did when social security was implemented. Yet that turned out extremely well, considering that those funds actually serve to help the economy in a big way, since it is spent in America. Unlike the money the super wealthy have, as they tend to stick it in places and use it in ways that does not benefit the economy. How many trillions of dollars have these people stuck in offshore accounts? That money is not benefiting the US economy, or the average citizen either.

America is for the rich. If you are smart but not quite smart enough to get a scholarship, you have to gamble. Take a tour with the military, hope you will get a loan, whatever. In Europe if you are smart enough and hard working enough thats all you need. An education to land a well paid job as an engineer with Porsche would cost you 28.000 € and that includes rent and food. The downside is everyone can do it, so you have to be quite good to make the cut.

About time America stopped blowing up people with their tax money and start investing a lump into free health care (without extra taxation like the current Obamacare what ever the # it is)

reply to post by JiggyPotamus


The right / left dichotomy is just political theater for the uninformed.

Health care reform, when written by the health insurance companies, was bound to be a disaster. Doing "something", even though it makes things a hundred times worse, is never the answer.

People keep playing this party game, not realizing that both parties are like a two headed dog: The faces are different, but what comes out the back end is exactly the same. Only the red herring issues (abortion, gay rights, gun control) are different, for distraction purposes.

reply to post by kurthall


Don' t have a link, just a true story of an acquaintance : he was bitten on the finger by a western diamondback rattler that was less than a foot long. He received ( at the Sierra Vista -AZ- med center ) a world- record dose of 80 U , I think , antivenom. It didn't save him. Two years later, the wife sued and won.
I guess you can't sue a rattler...
This may be in the archives of ' The Sierra Vista Herald- Review ' .
But, no matter what it costs, pay it !

luciddream
In Canada i would use that $89,000 and throw in another 10k to buy a Nissan GTR and drive all the way to hospital to get it treated for free.

TLDR; you guys need a good healthcare system.

edit on 1/28/2014 by luciddream because: (no reason given)

And anything else is insanity. As for me, wouldn't purchase the car, oh and the treatment is free.

For anybody wondering, that works out at a rate of around $1.37 a second.

mithrawept
Here in the UK, the cost of the treatment would have been free.

The irony is that we have no indigenous poisonous snakes.

Except for the common European adder (vipera berus), which is native to the British mainland (though absent from the island of Ireland). Deaths from adder bites aren't that common here - 14 since 1876, the last known fatality a five-year-old child in 1975 - but prompt medical treatment is advisable!

You're right about free treatment at the moment, but there is pressure to move towards care funded partly or wholly by private insurance. In our private sector, billing is no less creative than it is in the US. A family friend was charged £2,500 for dressings after stomach surgery, and £500 per overnight stay - and that was 20 years ago.