Hospital charges $9,000 to bandage cut middle finger, report says

[DeepseekerADS]

Hospital charges $9,000 to bandage cut middle finger, report says | Fox News

Published August 09, 2014
FoxNews.com

A New Jersey teacher said he was charged nearly $9,000 after he showed a cut middle finger to a hospital emergency room aide.

Baer Hanusz-Rajkowski said he went to the Bayonne Medical Center last August after he cut his finger with a hammer and thought he needed stitches. He didn’t. Instead he was sent home after he got a tetanus shot from a nurse practitioner who also sterilized the cut, applied some antibacterial ointment to it, and put a bandage on it.

Then he got the bill: $8,200 for the emergency room visit, $180 for the shot, $242 for the bandage and $8 for the ointment, plus hundreds of dollars for the nurse practitioner.

"I got a Band-Aid and a tetanus shot. How could it be $9,000? This is crazy," Hanusz-Rajkowski told NBC 4 New York Wednesday.

The hospital’s CEO Mark Spektor told the station Hanusz-Rajkowski’s visit cost so much because his insurance carrier United Healthcare refuses to offer fair reimbursement rates.

But United Healthcare responded by saying the hospital was just trying to gouge its members.

Linda Schwimmer of the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute said the right price for getting a finger bandaged should be $400 to $1,000.

She told NBC that New Jersey needs a public database showing the average price for medical procedures.

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

Upgraded Night Vision Monocular Digital Infrared Monocular Telescope for 100% Darkness with 8X Zoom - Grab it through Amazon!

[Red James Cash]

Unreal,even the 400 to 1000 is unreal,hell come on over i'll bandage it give you lunch i'll even kiss your finger to make it feel better all for 100 bucks

 

[CoinandRelicMan]

Sounds like something is not right there to me !

 

[DeepseekerADS]

I walked into a box in the dark while barefoot and broke a middle toe. Figured I needed to go to the emergency room. Waited, waited, and waited to be seen. Doctor looked at it and said "Yep it's broken". Took a strip of that white medical tape and affixed the broken toe to an adjoining toe, and sent me home. The bill was $900... And that was 15 years ago.... Accounting for inflation, it's up times 10 - and that's $9,000 now.....

 

[Number9]

I walked into a box in the dark while barefoot and broke a middle toe. Figured I needed to go to the emergency room. Waited, waited, and waited to be seen. Doctor looked at it and said "Yep it's broken". Took a strip of that white medical tape and affixed the broken toe to an adjoining toe, and sent me home. The bill was $900... And that was 15 years ago.... Accounting for inflation, it's up times 10 - and that's $9,000 now.....

And now you know why I go with natural medicines and my own doctoring whenever possible!
I'm lucky so far, I've never been admitted to a hospital and I don't take any prescription drugs on a regular basis.
I'll be 66 years old in October.. unless I go out like a light bulb!

 

[stefen]

If it was my middle finger, it would become a symbol to the medical and billing staff...

 

[Rawhide]

Since healthcare reform was passed. I am called daily about our heath care assessments for me and my family. I dont give out information over the phone. They are not happy. Also I now have bill collectors working out of call centers calling me and my wife at work now all our personal information can be sold legally. We dont have any medical bills. The doctor visit was made by someone else, and then canceld. But I got billed for the doctor anyway. No luck getting it fixed. There is more here but I dont want to scare ya too much. We will be bailing out the healthcare system soon enough. I smell a rat.

 

[GMD52]

Here's an example of my bill for this winter's illness.....ICU, 8 days,,,$49,000, insurance paid $16.000.....Drs. well over $25,000 not sur how much they got, but most likely about 50%......my out of pocket will suger off at ab out $10k when all is said and done......? Still not sure it was worth it since still on the hook for more CT scans and follow-up visits....and people wonder why they make rum.....But I did live, that does mean something....But total bills of $75,000 plus starting on the day you retired....priceless....Gary

 

[Treasure_Hunter]

Gary is that on lucifercare?

I know I checked and if I had signed up my max out of pocket for this year have been $12,800.

Just make token payments...

Glad your doing better!!!

 

[Red James Cash]

Just make token payments..

In rolls of their garbage zinc pennies.

 

[Coconut_Monkey]

that bill is because its UHC, UHC typically pays 15% of what a doctor/hospital bills. so to get their 1200 they probably would charge anybody else they inflated to 9k to get the 1200 to 1300 they most likely got from UHC. Most of the hospitals in my region have stopped accepting UHC because their fee schedule is so poor, and that's providing they can get UHC to pay at all, takes on average 4-7 months for UHC to pay, been that way for many years.

CocoNUT.

 

[GMD52]

Gary is that on lucifercare?

I know I checked and if I had signed up my max out of pocket for this year have been $12,800.

Just make token payments...

Glad your doing better!!!

TH, no it's with private insurance, and I too have a max out of pocket of 12K, and am only making the payments that I can afford. I should also mention that the max out of pocket, equals the 12K per year I pay in premiums!......Which by the way is cheaper than bummercare, or should I say the " unaffordable" health care system. I hope that these individuals with policies that they are only paying minimal payments on don't get sick.....they haven't realized the extent of their deductibles that have to be met.....Gary

 

[texasred777]

In 2008, I went to the emergency room at the local hospital. I had 'acute bronchitis'. It was Friday afternoon and I knew if I didn't get some meds started, I'd probably be in the hospital by Monday morning. The nurse (male) took my vitals, then about 40 minutes later a doctor walked in, took a look at the chart the nurse had filled out, and asked what I thought was wrong. I told him I had trouble with bronchitis still, but not as often as I did a few years earlier. We talked a few minutes about my past history of smoking, when I quit, etc. He had the nurse give me an albuterol treatment through a nebulizer. After that, the nurse brought me a box of pills. Also a script for a 'weak' antibiotic. I didn't think it would be effective, because I had taken it before. (Can't remember what the name is, a pink liquid.) Oh, yeah, Amoxicillin. Anyway, after about 4 days, I didn't seem to getting much better, but not worse, and went to see my regular doctor. He looked at what was given to me and said that since the people at the hospital didn't know what worked for me, they just had to guess and try to give me something that wouldn't be too strong for my system. He gave me a script for another antibiotic and told me to continue taking the tablets that I was given.

After Medicare paid their part, I received a bill for something like $2100. I couldn't believe it. The box of pills they gave me looked like it had been on the shelf for a couple dozen years, but it was not outdated. On the bill, the box of pills was billed out as $270. I called the Walmart pharmacy and asked how much it would cost to fill this prescription. I was told that it was $41!!! That's over 6 times cheaper than the hospital charged me.

I called the hospital billing office and griped about all of it. They told me that the box of pills was charged out at that price because the hospital had to make a profit or go out of business. I asked for a 'hardship' form, filled it out, and got a reduction on the total bill. I paid it out at $20 to $30 per month. I don't know how it will charge in the future. It was taken over by one of the Boise hospitals that seems pretty great from what I hear from people who have used it.

 

[DeepseekerADS]

6 years ago I was paying $835 a month for the primo plan from United Health Care, and I even had a kicker thrown in so my portion would be minimal.

So, I decided that since I hadn't had a complete check-up in many years, I'd go get one since it wouldn't cost me much.

So, I got on the doctor's merry-go-round, all kinds of testing.

Then I got the bill for my portion, it was over $10,000, and I'd just gotten laid off due to the too big to fail so fail us scenario....

I went to the hospital and complained, pled my case. Without much ado, the gal IMMEDIATELY lowered my portion to just under $4,000, and put me on an interest free $98 a month.

It was incredible to me how easily they lowered the bill, and quickly...

And that's a point we all should consider when we get bills like that. No phone call, go straight to hospital account services.

 

[Number9]

If it was another field of service besides "medical" it would be considered extortion.. which it is!
I was reading the other day where it's common for a doctor to buy chemotherapy drugs and increase the price 3 or 4 times for the patients... I guess it's called "kick'm while they're down"!?

 

[Coconut_Monkey]

I used to ask my doc for Viagra samples, last few times the nurse kept telling me they didn't have any...I'm like why not ? she told me matter of factly that the doctor was taking them all home for himself...*******!

Coco-blue-Nut.

 

[Digger]

As someone who works in healthcare let me shed some light on a few things.

Because of ACA (affordable care act/Obamacare), and many non-insured immigrants, the insurance companies are trying to keep people from using the ER as their normal physician to avoid a doctors call. Unfortunately, many abuse the emergency room and go there for some of the most simple stuff like a hangnail or a cold. The ER is for Emergencies. If your visit is deemed a non-emergency that your insurance company felt could have been avoided it will cost you a lot. A trip to the ER is very expensive because the cost to maintain it is very expensive. If you ever have to go there in a life or death matter the cost won't matter I assure you.

If you're really interested take a look at this. http://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/blog/why-aspirin-taken-hospital-can-cost-upwards-25

Many patients take their first look at a hospital bill, only to go into sticker shock. A single aspirin for $25? Newborn diapers for $100? Why is it that products we purchase for pennies at the local drug store end up costing so much more in the hospital?The culprit behind these high costs is our reimbursement structure.
Public programs do not fully pay for the cost of care. The latest figures estimate that hospitals lose $35 billion a year on Medicare, Medicaid and other forms of government reimbursement. For specific procedures, the picture can be even bleaker.
Take note, because this money isn’t lost – you pay the difference. Unable to absorb these losses, the bill gets passed to commercial insurers and employers that purchase health plans for their employees. Hence the itemized charges of $25 for an aspirin or $100 for diapers that are paid by insurers today, and by you and me tomorrow in the form of higher premiums and co-pays. And it’s only going to get worse as our population ages and more of us call Medicare our insurance provider.

 

[jeff of pa]

well if I worked at the Hospital and they told me they Needed Ointment, I'd say Give me $5.00 I'll go get it.
Then when I got to the Hospital Pharmacy, I'd grab the $1.00 Generic Ointment, & tell them to Bill it.
That gives them the ability to add $2.00 for a Decent pen to write up & send a Bill

as for the Bandage, Oops I forgot, But if you expect me to walk all the way back again,
I want $200

 

[Red James Cash]

(affordable care act/Obamacare

( Unaffordable care act ) fits better.

 

[Coconut_Monkey]

Not unaffordable for tons of people, I know lots of poor folks that are dancing in the streets because for the first time in their lives they don't have to choose between eating or buying meds, or being able to even see a doctor. you cannot please everybody, somebody will feel the crunch, I'm elated that people of all classes can now get some kind of health care, it may not be great, but it is working better than say Canada's health system where you can wait a half a year or longer to see a specialist.

CocoNUT