Healthcare costs make no sense ($11k for an FNA biopsy)

I made a couple grand a year letting Pennington do shite like that to me

Those were the good ole days

Had a two hour drs visit in September

$23,000

$2500 out of pocket

fricking wild

A lot of times its the facility charges that are outragous. Not as much the doctors.

I don’t know if they still do them but the Pennington studies were wild when I was in school

I did one where I ate 2000 extra calories a day for six weeks

Another one was a 1000 calorie deficit for six weeks

One was just eating a bunch of manda sausage with a placebo drug

First two involved multiple biopsies

I’ll probably die early

The cost is out of control, but the even bigger issue is that you have no idea what it will cost but are obligated to pay it. That’s where healthcare is in a league of its own and it has to stop.

There are plenty of examples where you can enter two offices across the street from each other for the same service and one is $150 and the other is $2000. Pick the wrong door and you’re fricked.

Have a good friend who makes a killing in the insurance business. He told me recently something very relevant to your 11k procedure.

"I have bad news but you're paying for those wildfires in California whether you want to or not"

quote:

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Is this normal? I am blown away by this. Thank frick I have an HSA but it’s certainly going to suck a lot from it.

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Normal? Yes. A racket? Yes?

Basically. There is probably a cure for cancer. But it will not make nearly as much money for Doctors and Pharmaceuticals if it becomes a normal practice.

Drag out your eventual death for as much money as possible - that is what pays the stocks and doctors.

It was 14k before to put tubes in my child last week

Insurance "rates" are driven largely by three things:
1) Medicare rates
2) The amount of money they "ask" to charge in order to make up for the millions of deadbeats that never pay anything (illegal or not)
3) The shite they are forced to do in order to avoid litigation

As soon as you pay cash, the total billed gets much cheaper. Most of us have been shoved into high deductible plans anyway. Memorial Hermann charged my insurance two different amounts ($1200 and $1400 for the same procedure) eight weeks apart in the same facility. I paid cash, and went off site, and got the same imaging done for $180. MRIs done under insurance are thousands, cash payer, $220.

Sedated endoscopy was under $500 paying cash for me. With insurance, the amount of write downs and recovery rates on accounts receivable all generate metrics they care about, and the government can adjust reimbursements for. Pre ACA, on a "platinum plan," one kid cost me about $2,500 out of pocket for a birth. Two years later, in the same hospital, the next kid cost me more than twice that out of pocket, on the same plan.