It's common knowledge that our healthcare system is in disarray, with hospitals practically gutting the wallets of many Americans every year. Here are two shocking examples of just how absurd the situation is getting.
Who's Stinging Whom?
52 year old Arizonan Marcie Edmonds was doing some chores in her garage when she suddenly felt a sensation she had never experienced before. There was a sharp pain in her abdomen and when she looked down. Edmonds was able to immediately diagnose the culprit. It was a scorpion.
At first she did nothing, aside from hopefully killing the scorpion, but after only an hour her symptoms progressed rapidly to the point where she was not able to even see straight. It was at this point that she called Poison Control and was advised to immediately go to the nearest hospital with the anti-venom she required, Chandler Regional Medical Center.
Upon arriving at the hospital she was immediately given two doses of the drug Anascorp via an IV and three hours later she was released, symptom-free. Then she really got stung.
A week later she received a bill from the hospital to the tune of $39,652 per dose, for a grand total of $83,046. To gain perspective on this already astronomical amount, in Mexico pharmacies sell the exact same antivenom (it's made there) for a paltry $100 a dose. To make matters worse, Edmond's health insurance wouldn't even foot the whole bill, leaving her to pay over $25,000 for a three-hour-long IV and a medicine that shouldn't cost more than a few hundred dollars.
Car Wreck? Five Times Multiplier!
Everybody seemed to want to blind side Melissa Torres. She was involved in a collision with a motorist who was travelling the wrong way down the road in 2011, and unsurprisingly wound up in the hospital because of it.
Torres eventually settled with the driver for the maximum that their insurance policy would allow, $30,000. Her hospital bills were high but manageable, at $4850 she could pay them off with the money from the settlement and still be able to buy a new car to replace her wrecked one. This was, naturally, unacceptable to the hospital that treated her.
Several months later, when the Mainland Medical Center in Texas City, TX (a suburb of Houston) found out that she had been involved in a settlement, they went ahead and simply raised what she owed to over $20,000.
Mind you, it's not that she had owed $20,000, they took pity on her and let Torres pay $4850, and then decided she had to pay the full amount instead. No. They literally decided to just raise the charges to more than five times what they original amount was. In practice, this is no different than going into a Burger King, ordering a quarter pounder, and then Burger King calling you a couple months later demanding another $20 because they found out you have more money now. Expectedly, Torres has filed a lawsuit against the hospital.
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