Health Care: An Expensive Lack of Organization

Unless one can compare, it is often quire difficult to figure out how much organizing Health Care may bring in personal and professional disappointments.

Today I lost consciousness just a few seconds while I was in the kitchen and started falling down. My wife, instinctively, was trying to prevent me from falling and has fallen with me. She hurt her elbow. It is only thanks to our neighbors that she was able to recover.

And now starts the comparison:

We went to an ER - the hospital is not far from these premises - it was about 10:30 AM. They took care of her at about 11:00AM which was quite fast by the way. Then the administrative people asked me for a guarantee of $ 10,000 out of them just the final bill should be, as I learned later on, with just one radiography showing that the elbow was broken up to the shoulder, not exceeding $2,000, ER room included for something less than $1,500 for the day.

I paid out 50% of the $2,000 to learn that, of course, this should not include the doctors fees neither the need for us to visit an orthopedist - the hospital provided me with the address -on Monday because he is not working on Sundays. We left the hospital at 3:30PM with an ordinance for painless pills ($ 10) and a temporary bandage.

In some way this is laughable because, as per the doctors which took care of her, she will need to go on surgery due to the need of 2 brooches and a pin plate.

I have no idea, ye, about how much will be the price of such new surgical procedure but I can already compare with any centralized health care system where she should have been fully supported, with a period of maybe 2 or 3 hours, and would have kept her for one full day. But then the centralized system would have presented only one invoice for the hospital, the emergency room, the radiographies, the brooches and all related cares and services.

Instead of each intervention being billed privately or, at the least,  in a non organized system which leaves the pain for hours, the centralized system implies a thorough checking of all the bills. My son, who had a motorcycle accident in March and had the foot completely destroyed, stayed in hospital a full day, had surgery for 4 hours, altogether for a final cost of a bit less than $17,500 which have been completely paid out by the healthcare Swiss insurance. Of course, this included a full reconstruction of the foot and such intervention  cost was closely watched by the insurance, follow-up included

IMO, this is an interesting comparison, which explains the how come of the exponential rise of the health care costs: indeed everyone one is able, in a so-called "free" market, to bill what one should feel it is right, mainly if the patient cannot discuss or has no reasons for discussing or negotiate. But when an accident, it is quite impossible to go from a hospital to a doctor asking them how much for such care and start negotiating: if a doctor says I will ask for $20,000, no one  with a broken elbow would be able to negotiate the cost: it has to be done whichever is the requested price.

This experience of mine shows how come so many corporations and professions are against a centralized system: they could not be billing what they like to. And the hospital unpaid bills are obviously to be paid out by the "anonymous" tax-payer while the professional may have an insurance for unpaid bills and has, therefore, an interest to be as expensive as possible.

Is is so good to be a member of a liberal profession! And they call Obama and his Health Care system because it asks for regulations, "liberal"! This goes upside down!