This morning I had a follow up appointment with the sleep specialist. Their office is an hour and 20 minutes from my home, and I’m missing about 3 hours of work by the time it’s all done. I walk in the PA’s office and he already had the data from my machine (it uploads to them by cell service). He has the tech make a change to the settings, but tells me if I have problems to call because they can change it remotely. I’m out of his office in under 5 minutes. The entire thing could have been handled over the phone. But they couldn’t bill BCBS a couple hundred bucks and get me for a co-pay that way.

I’m ready for the revolution

Move to Canada

I’d still be waiting to get in to the sleep specialist. 🙄

Besides, I hate cold and cheese curds

The insurance company will low-ball them, they'll negotiate and by the time they're done, the Dr will get what they wanted and the only one who's inconvenienced is you.

Do they know how long it takes for you to drive there? If not, I would make it abundantly clear that it's costing you money, wasting time and if they make you drive there for a 5 minute tweak, you should find a way to get the Dr to talk about AV, so you can bill them for a consultation.

It's the medical insurance industry that's f#cking this up- they're the ones who deny coverage, cause doctors and hospitals to jack up their rates because the insurers will grind them on cost and if they disappeared, everyone would have to do their own admin or hire someone to do it, but whoever it is, they should have absolutely no control over what's covered and what's not. The medical industry wants to treat people but insurers deny coverage for conditions that the patient may have no control over (unlike some, which require a lifestyle change to prevent or reduce). Also, insurers should have covered preventive measures, but they resisted for decades.

Send a bill for your time and vehicle expense- it will, at least, start the conversation about how this should have been handled.

I've been getting into health a lot over the past year and what I've come to realize is that there are SO MANY factors at play. The doctors are treating symptoms vs. prevention. Pharma is a business who doesn't care about the public. Look at the Epipen as an example. Or I recently heard about a drug manufacturer that works with (colludes) their generic competitors to maintain high prescription prices. In Canada, the drug goes for 8,000 and in the US it goes for 48,000.

There is so much important information coming down the pipe line but most traditional doctors are choosing to ignore it because it's not what they are taught in school. Then factor in the patients. People are overworked, overstressed, living in a world filled with toxic shit (lead, mercury, glyphosate, etc.), and so many more things that it's almost impossible to make good choices. How are we supposed to have free health care for anyone when they are allowed to eat whatever the f#$k they want. Seems fair to those who care what their health is???

Humans went from eating 1-3 meals a day with only plants and animals in their diets to 3 large meals with 2 snacks in between. It's causing type II diabetes at an alarming rate when all we have to do is control our urges and human nature. We are genetically programmed to eat as much as we can because 100 years ago (and from the beginning of time), food was much more scarce. We had to hunt or cultivate/harvest our food which took a lot of work. Now we sit on our fat asses eating snacks all day playing Fortnight on our Xbox...

Simply changing laws won't change what we have to change culturally. What about drugs and addiction? What about illegal immigrants who use our system but are likely not contributing to it? How about our legal system? Seems like limiting what people can sue for would help reduce some of the MANY frivolous law suits that happen. The moral of the story is that we are in control of our health and eating "right" and having physical activity is critical if we want to fix the health care system. Sorry for the soap box moment....

Who hates cheese curds?

What do you think they will get in the end? $50? It would save everyone money if the damn insurance companies would pay them $50 up front for a phone consultation, and the office wouldn’t need an army in the billing department to fight the insurance companies. I’d even be ok with giving a $10 copay for that phone consultation. It would save me time and money. If I was hourly, I’d be out roughly $75 to $100 before the copay

Some of you know this, some of you don't.  In September, my wife was diagnosed with a brain tumor. It was a grade II Meningioma that was covering 25% of her brain.  She started getting severe headaches...and they found it.

They took her into surgery on Sept. 17th at 8am. That was a Monday, she was back home by  Thursday @11:30am.  By Friday, we were joking around..."Can you believe that you just had a brain surgery?"

The bill came up to $485,000.

I'm responsible for $3k. Chase bank (her employer) is covering the rest.

I'm perfectly happy with our medical system.

The reason our medical system is expensive is because our R&D is subsidizing the rest of the world.

The medical system isn't broken, it's working exactly as it was designed to, it just wasn't designed with patient care as a concern.

There's a million reasons why medical costs are crazy high.

The hospitals are a part of it as well. Anyone see the details on the "New Federal Law where all hospitals must post prices online." ?

It's all a bunch of BS that no one can actually understand. They won't actually show what the cost are until after you get a bill, and even then you won't know why the bill is so extremely inflated.

Somewhere hidden in all that BS is the $100.00 aspirin.


Well, at least if we did go to a single payer system, you wouldn't have that stuff to worry about. Nothing much would be covered.

And then all you have to do is wait, and wait and wait and wait and wait.

It seems to me that the health care system in the US isn't to bad/crazy until you enter the hospital, that's when it gets really crazy. Once you enter a hospital all bets are off and no one has any control over costs. (There are exceptions with some of the drug prices and stuff.) It's all specialized treatment at that point and every doctor needs their cut. Also, around here, every hospital has been redone or is brand new, that's no way to reduce costs!

Speaking of the $100 aspirins, I have 3 young daughters. After my wife gave birth to each of them, I would look over the itemized bill we would recieve from the insurance company.

Any time my wife requested pain pills, $125 for Tylenol, couldn't believe this was actually itemized for the patients to see.

Fast forward several years, I have a friend in the insurance bill and this was brought up. He explained to me that the $125 isn't just for the Tylenol, it was also to pay the labor for the nurse to get it.

Thinking back on it, every time it was requested, the nurse would literally just step out of the room to a locked cart in the hallway and grab what she needed.

I'd love to be compensated $100 plus for 10 seconds of work all day too, but this is just BS.

I'm glad your wife is OK, but those numbers are f*cking insane.

A 3-day stay at nearly $6500/hr! DAMN. I should have gotten into the insurance business!

I think that part of the cost inflation is so that intermediaries (pill brokers, insurance brokers, etc.) can show that they've negotiated great savings. On some of my insurance statements there is a column "Not Paid". While this is not explained anywhere, and the row math does not always add up, I'm sure that this is the most important column to someone along the line -- "look at what my negotiation skills saved". In many cases, this is the largest entry of the row.