Blown Away - the hospital bill showed up

Glad to have insurance (United HealthCare).

30 hours at Yale New Haven (CT) Hospital, Davinci Surgery. The total below does NOT include any doctors.

$40,835.00

This is the "pre-discounted" total. Suffice it to say, I am speechless.

I don't have the details, just the emailed bill total.

Comments?

Can't wait to hear Bronson's Canadian free gov't med plan comment

Mine was $64k.

I was out of pocket very little (can't remember but probably $100)

Mel

GTODave:
In Canada, there are set guidelines as to what dollar value can be charged for procedures and what procedures are allowed - and at what time intervals - as well as what the doctor can claim back - in most cases, to no monetary charge to the patient. Other procedures are billed and they can be hefty too if you do not have insurance.

Nothing in the world is free, and we Canadians pay for our "universal health care" through our taxes at work ( federal and provincal) , and with what we purchase. There is sometimes a time delay in which elective surgery is subject to and as well as when test results are processed.. but all in all, I would not be alive today, if I had to face the costs of the American Medical System.

Wishing you all the best.
healthcare hugs,
BRONSON
...........

P.S. one of the OHIP guideline parameters: for orchiectomy due to testicle cancer - is no charge to the patient ( often a day surgery) - but if he wants to have a prosthesis put in - he has to pay for it !
....

I had RRP in Dec 10 at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, with follow-up catheter removal. In hospital 4 days. Total bill, including doctors, was $40K. Felt like it was a bargain.

i was in the hospital 24 hours, albeit in a private room so all my family could sleep the night there with me, and that bill was $21K at mount sinai. That was all covered by insurance.

My insurance also covered some of the docs, about $4000 worth.

My insurance ( which sucks btw) did not cover my surgeon. The surgeon I chose was out of network. His fee is $45k. When we called, his office manager told me that this doctor didn't believe in turning away people with cancer who wanted to use him. They told me they would collect as much as they could from my insurance, and charge me $7890. They managed to collect $7000 from my insurance. So my surgeon ended up doing it for under $15K. A bargain in my eyes because I was dead set on wanting him and would have paid the $45K if I had to. My family helped. We all understood that this was a one shot deal and that I had to use who I thought was the best for me.

btw, my urologist submitted a bill for $7800 for my biopsy two months before the surgery. I think the insurance gave him under $2K for it.

yeah, my firm was hit by a series of cancer episodes and the firm had a lot of trouble even finding an insurance company that would take us. Yeah, I grew up is Europe with socialized medicine, but there has to be something wrong with a system where insurance companies turn you down because people in your firm got "too" sick the previous year.

My surgery at a top notch hospital with one of the best robitic surgeons in the country was only $21,000 total in 2007.   $15,000 for the hospital and $6,000 for the surgeon.  My insurance paid $12,000 to the hospital and $3500 to the surgeon and they never billed me for the rest.

I'm Canadian:

I recently attended a prostate support meeting where a Canadian surgeon had assisted 200 Da Vinci procedures at a special clinic in the US. According to him and post op results, outcomes were pretty much identical to open surgery with one exception, incontinence. Da Vinci patients had a much longer recovery of continence than open patients did and there is no apparent reason why this is the case.

From a cost stand point, Da Vinci cost more to perform but post-op recovery in the hospital is shorter than open. However, Da Vinci overall is more expensive and patents seem to like the fact that their belly isn't being split open. My uro said that the US health model prefers to sell technology since it is a fee based system even though the outcomes are the same for the patient.

Many of you reported that your insurance either picked up the tab or did most of the heavy lifting, that's great for you. PBS did a show on health care systems around the world, they reported that 700,000 Americans have to declare bankruptcy each year due to medical costs and 40 million don't have insurance. Is that acceptable from a country that declares to have one of the highest living standards in the world?(that's a question BTW, not a statement, I'd like some feedback).

My recent surgery, hospital stay (4 days), pre-op and post-op PSA tests, biopsy, all visits to my doctors, chest X-ray, CT scan, bone scan and ultra sounds have cost me squat. Sure I pay, as everyone has to, into a medical plan but that is only $726 a year. I'd hate to think what all this would have cost me south of the 49.

I though that I paid a lot for surgery but most of you have me beat. My work colleagues wanted me to use the National Institutes for Health. They would do robotic surgery for FREE. Yes, that is correct. If you can get your butt down to Bethesda, MD, if might be a 2 to 3 month wait, but you can get a robotic prostatectomy for no charge. These are your US tax dollars at work. NIH is a research facility and they produce much in the way of cutting edge therapies and funds for other studies. So don't be disappointed if you could not take advantage of the "free lunch" so to speak. You get it back in other ways via new tests, techniques that are developed, etc. So they work on real patients to collect study data and work just like real doctors in the rest of the world.

My surgeon at Hopkins was out of network, but the cost for his feel alone that had to be paid up front was just over $5,300. BC/BS took care of most of the other things involved, (hospital stay of 2 days) assistant physician, drugs, anesthesia, etc. For those who chart these things, it was interesting that the majority of the Hopkins surgeons charge around the same $5,300 for an open RP. The robotic is around $12,000 but if you want the "big name" and try to book Patrick Walsh for surgery, he cost around $14,000 for open surgery. He is amazing. To be in his 70s and still doing surgery is quite remarkable.

Got to get back to work and pay off these doctor's bills.

Mike S.

The scheduled chats are on Wednesday.

they get billed at the hospital. They aren't turned away if they have no coverage, but they get billed. Then you and I pay for it when they don't pay their bill.

I've lived in Europe and socialized medicine was just fine. My mother had heart surgery in England. I was hospitalized in Italy.

American system is great when you can afford it.

My surgery was performed by one of the top in the field. People fly from Europe to see him. Curiously, he was trained in France.

Hi GTO,

My bill was in the neighborhood of 30K with a 2 night stay. That does not include all pre-surgical testing.

North49: I read your post again and did not see the direct comparison between the population of Canada and the number of uninsured in the US. I see you cited 40 million but did not see any comparison with the population of Canada cited. Perhaps I am missing a post.

You asked if it is acceptable to have this occur in the US. Actually, by default, yes it is. If people wanted to have socialized medicine and pay the kind of taxes that are required to support it, we would have legislators being browbeaten by citizens and lobbyists howling to get this system in place. The most recent permutation of this is was the only major piece of legislation Obama put into place. Unfortunately, it is jury-rigged into a half-baked system and provides an expensive band-aid to an open free enterprise system. I could not agree more with nearly everyone who posted that it takes having a good job and lots of money to retain good health care provisions as an American citizen.

We have lots of jury-rigged system in this country. Our health care system is broken but we do manage to have some of the best most innovative research anywhere on earth so some part of it works well. Our tax codes are outrageous, built on one modification after another. Soon we will dedicate all the taxes we collect will go toward Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. We fought two major wars and never raised a penny in taxes to help pay for them. So it is no wonder we are growing broke.

Free enterprise is about the only thing that is working successfully. However, if we hamper that system with some social medicine overlay and not provide new money and incentives for companies to prosper in the US, we will have to settle for a mediocre system of health care and worst of all loose leadership in the pharmaceutical industry in the US as well as in medical research. (Recall my NIH story. Lots of money flows out of NIH to eager medical researchers all over the US. Starve that fund and we all loose, US Citizens and Canadians alike.) Which brings me to my last point.

Thanks for the reference to the website on Canada's pharmaceutical industry. Sure, they are doing fine but notice that the leadership they maintain is interdependent on US and European pharmaceutical manufacturers. My point is Canada cannot go it alone. Look at the list from the website you provided. See the group of Global Investors who are providing support. Here is the same list with the corporate headquarters listed along side.

Amgen – Thousand Oaks CA
Astra Zeneca – London, UK
Bayer – Germany
Bristol Myers Squibb – New York
Eli Lilly – Indianapolis, IN
Glaxo Smith Kline – Philadelphia, PA
Hoffman La Roche – Basel, Switzerland
Johnson & Johnson - New Brunswick, NJ
Merck – Whitehouse Station, NJ
Novartis – Basel, Switzerland
Novopharm –Toronto, Canada
Pfizer – New York, NY
Sandoz – Princeton, NJ
Sanofi-Aventis – Bridgewater, NJ
Sanofi Pasteur – Lyon France / NJ

Notice the pattern. These are the big, well known, well financed drug companies. Out of the 15 companies listed as supporters of Canadian initiatives, only one is Canadian. 5 are European and 10 are American. In fact, if New Jersey exploded tomorrow, (sometimes I think it might given the industries that line the NJ Turnpike) the drug industry worldwide would be in a lot of trouble.
America - (US and Canada) has a symbiotic relationship with medical/pharma research. So before we get down on the US medical/pharmaceutical industry be thankful they produce the things they do. Let's see any one of us make a useful drug on our own.

We all have our strengths and weaknesses. It is the main reason I don't buy the debate on which system is superior. Both have strong and weak points. We wlll leave it at that.

Mike S.