this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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I just got hardware put in my ankle. From what I've seen of the costs so far, I'm guessing the whole ordeal, from the moment paramedics arrived at my house to when I am fully healed and finished with physical therapy, will cost about $100k. The doctor cutting my ankle open was billed for $16k. That was just the surgery. No post-op meds or anything were included in that. I had an ambulance ride, an ER visit, a 2 day stay in the hospital, and an outpatient pre-op visit before the surgery even happened.
I had a surgery in 2017 that was billed out at right around $1,000,000 total. Literally saved my life.
Bonus points to anyone who can guess what it was!
Appendectomy?
Nope, but not a bad guess. Most appendectomies are laparoscopic andrelatively quick and simple.
Cardiac surgery
Not yet on that one, good guess though. That’s another I think is pretty up there!
I'm not surprised at that bill, tbh. Healthcare is a fucking joke in the US. Did you have heart surgery? Some kind of organ transplant? Or was it something hella basic like an appendectomy?
Bingo! The cost of a liver transplant in the US is about $878,400. I had liver and kidney.
On top of that I needed dialysis 3x a week for ~6 months before the transplant and that was billed out at a little of $7,000 per visit, north of $21,000 a week, for 26 weeks, over $500,000 billed for that alone.
Healthcare costs in the US are absolutely gross!
Holy fuck. That's so much. God forbid you live and continue to function in society. It's almost like the people who control the prices just want us to die or some shit.
Kind of. The hospitals and clinics don’t want that, in part because a sick patient is a revenue stream and in part because I’m sure a lot of medical professionals genuinely care about their patients.
I’d say the health insurance companies are more interested in a sick patient’s death. They’d prefer healthy people paying premiums but not having a lot of claims. It increases their profits.
Dang, you got a full body renovation. You don't seem that upset about the million dollar bill. Did your insurance cover it all?
On Oct. 20, 1972, Nixon signed H.R. 1 into law. The law automatically qualified anyone with chronic renal disease, anyone who would need a kidney transplant, for Medicare, regardless of age.
So Medicare covers transplants and post care for a period and I was eligible even at my relatively young age, early 30s.
That said, the poor life choices that I made that led to needing the transplants also left me in a pretty big financial hole before healthcare and I had a month long hospital stay long before the transplant when I first got really sick.
In the end I filed for bankruptcy to free myself from the medical debt but also to get a clean start on the life I fucked up.
Even with the existing social safety nets it’s incredibly easy to go broke with our healthcare system.
Gender reassignment?
Nope, although I can only imagine what they bill for that!
WTF? I'm in Europe and I broke my finger recently, so I had to get surgery. I literally paid 26€ + 2€ for pain meds and that includes an ambulance, multiple doctors visits, surgery and physical therapy.
I cannot imagine living with the fear of having random medical problems ruin you financially.
See, the thing is, you can just ignore medical debt for the most part. I was told by the hospital billing people, while panicking over finances, that I can pay like $1/month and say that's all I can afford and the companies just have to deal with it. You can also just ignore it outright for 7 years and then it's gone forever. It can fuck with your credit if you do that, but it is an option.
The cost of shit is still bad though. It's so dumb