U.S. Healthcare: Bending Your Bank Account
Christopher Gabriel | Oct 14, 2008 | Comments 4
By Christopher Gabriel, CGabriel.com
A few months ago, my 18-month-old daughter hurt her left elbow. There was no bruising, no blood . . . absolutely nothing my wife and I could see that was causing her to be in what clearly was excruciating pain. She walked around with her arm hanging down beside her, tilting her body in a way that didn’t allow anyone the opportunity to even look at the arm, much less touch it.
We immediately contacted her doctor. Well, not really her doctor. Who really speaks to their doctor on the phone anymore? I spoke to The Call Center.
Have you ever tried to get through to George Bush at the White House? How about Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin? You’ve got a better shot reaching either of them than making headway with the former KGB agents manning the phones at The Call Center.
The level of kindness, caring and simple decency they offer rivals that of verbal waterboarding.
The Call Center informed me our daughter’s doctor was not working that day. As best as I can tell, his office hours are Tuesday mornings from 8 to 10 am. Asking if anyone else was in the office that might be able to see our daughter nearly produced laughter from the gal handling my call. Apparently, I didn’t realize things simply aren’t done that way at this medical building. I was advised I could get an appointment with someone . . . in two weeks. Two weeks. Amazing.
With those options off the table, we took her to Urgent Care. Incredibly, we got in within 10 minutes of being there. The doctor came in and was as delightful as you would hope her to be, asking our older daughter what was wrong with her baby sister. Dr. “Jones” quickly assessed the situation to be Nursemaid’s Elbow.
She held our daughter’s left hand, bent her arm toward her, straightened her arm out . . . problem fixed. To that point, the entire visit from Dr. Jones was no more than 60 seconds. To get the elbow back in place took no more than 10 seconds.
The bill: $790.00 That’s Seven Hundred and Ninety Dollars.
If you’re scoring at home, that’s insane.
On the one hand, can you really put a price on your child’s health and well-being? No, of course not. At the same time, however, this wasn’t surgery. There wasn’t any equipment used. There were no medications, anaesthesia or other medical professionals involved.
One doctor. One arm. She bent the arm. She straightened the arm. $790.00 dollars. One more bend-and-straighten would have been nearly two grand.
To make matters worse – no, not worse, maddening – was getting in to see our daughter’s doctor a month later and have him show me what to do in the event it happened again. Meanwhile, every medical website I visited strongly advised “Don’t try to fix it yourself – you could do more harm than good.”
Legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi would say “What the hell is going on around here?”
I follow the constant battle over healthcare as much as anyone else. I’ve heard the plans from both Barack Obama and John McCain. It seems to me, however, the deeper problem isn’t just making healthcare available to everyone. Doctors and clinics, if they’re anything like ours, are ravaging people’s bank accounts, health insurance or not.
I have no idea how pricing is set but there isn’t a doctor, a nurse, a hospital administrator or a health insurance representative on this planet who can tell me $790.00 for a doctor taking 10 seconds to bend a little girl’s arm and then straighten it, is anything other than a sucker-punch to decency.
Apparently, having health insurance is terrific . . . until you get sick. Then, they’ve got you. Got a broken bone, a bad cut, Nursemaid’s Elbow? No problem. Come on in to Urgent Care. We’ll fix it. And then we’ll fix you.
I now understand why so many more companies are moving towards HSA’s (Health Savings Account). The very foundation of them forces you, the consumer, to begin asking questions. Questions like “I need a test for that? How much will it cost.”
I didn’t use to ask those questions because I was foolish. I actually believed two things were in play: I believed my health plan was sufficient enough to leave me with a fair payment for services rendered. And, I believed the services rendered would be fairly priced.
I was dreadfully wrong on both counts.
At this point, I’ve practically lost interest in which healthcare plan – or should we call it healthcare reform package – gets implemented in the coming year, if anything changes at all. What I do care about is that someone, or an independent agency, begins looking at the top of the food chain: Who is really setting these prices? If 10 seconds of arm-bending is $790.00 dollars, I cannot imagine what far more serious medical situations cost.
Two days per week, I teach acting and voice to young theatre students at a children’s theatre company in suburban Minneapolis. One of the basic tenets of my class is to ask questions. I emphatically tell them there are no dumb questions, ever, and that they cannot possibly ask a question too many times. Ask, I’ll tell them, until they’re certain the answer is clear.
In the healthcare arena, it’s time I take heed of the lesson I try so hard to implant into my talented teens.
For Blog Harbor and more cool stuff visit CGabriel.com
Congratulations, you hit the nail right on the thumb! What most people don’t know, at least those who have not yet shared a similar experience, is how easily the cost of medical care can spiral out of control and have disastrous effects on individuals and even entire families.
While traveling on a business trip in another state, I was hit head-on by an uninsured motorist, who lost control of their car. A month later, after coming out of a coma, I embarked on what was to become a life long journey of recovery which has included physical rehabilitation, just to be able to walk and use my hands again, and nine surgeries over the last eight years, including one on my left eye and three on my right eye for detached retinas.
I was well insured at the time of the accident, or so I thought, with one of the “Big Name” insurance companies, but it turned out to be grossly insufficient to cover the staggering costs for procedures and treatments I never could have imagined. I soon learned how insanely expensive an “accident” can be, even if you are not the one at fault.
Whenever I read or hear about an auto accident, my blood runs cold, because I know there is often much more at stake for the parties involved than we hear about or that mere words can describe. Rarely do we get to hear the “rest of the story.” I guess I could best be described as “recovering” from a near fatal auto accident. I wish I had a dime for the many times that people have said to me how “lucky” I am to be alive. Funny, I just don’t feel lucky.
For me, “recovering” has meant much more than the daily challenges of physical endurance and a change in life style. It has also meant extraordinary stress on my family, a career change, as well as depleting all my bank accounts, including savings and retirement, and it’s not over yet.
What most people don’t know is that they too are just a heartbeat away from a taking a journey like mine; one that could easily turn their life completely upside down and take their family along for the ride from a state of “comfortably middle class” to the unimaginable destination of “despair and financial ruin.”
While I will always remain an optimist, I have zero hope that either candidate will have much chance of healing a cancerous healthcare system that is so riddled with the disease of avarice and burdened by the weight of ignorance that it will surely one day collapse upon itself; in a manner I suspect not unlike the recent financial crisis of Wall Street.
The reason for this is the lack of gut wrenching fear on the part of the average American (for now anyways) and the failure of our outdated two party system which sustains an election process that literally forces those who would hope to get elected into becoming lackeys for the well heeled special interest groups that provide the astronomical sums of money needed to get elected these days.
The question is: will right thinking Americans learn from the “Wall Street Crisis” and let those we elect know loud, clear, and often that every individual has a vote and a voice that can be heard with emails, phone calls, letters and post cards; that change is not an option?
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Dave: Thank you for sharing your story. It is both remarkable and painfully sobering. Your thoughts on healthcare are ones often kept under the covers, as it were. As you so astutely observed, this entire healthcare system is “burdened by the weight of ignorance.”
My sincere best wishes to you and your family for much better times ahead.
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That is outrageous, CG! Man. Well. What was the exact charge that was 790? Wasn’t it just an office visit? It wasn’t like they had to pop the elbow back into place, was it?
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Stamford Talk: We went to Urgent Care. The $790.00 Blue Light Special was for the doctor bending her arm…then straightening it out. Essentially, a ligament needs to get repositioned in the joint. When the doctor bent the arm, holding the elbow while bending, the ligament actually “clicked” back into place.
Have someone hold your elbow. Now, have them bend your arm…and then straighten it. Then, pay him/her $790.00. Your elbow feels better but the rest of you is ready to explode.
Last year I had four weeks of physical therapy on my back. I went three times per week totaling about 12 hours of treatment. Total cost: LESS than what we paid for 10 seconds of arm-bending.
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