Paper gowns and kleenex cost $450 as well as any other “non-sterilized supply” in the room.

High prices brought to you courtesy of indigents who use the system..woohoo! :-/

Archer

P.S. Bring your own tylenol, etc, whatever you can bring on your own..Even your own breast milk pump can save you alot of $ in the end..

Archer

I’ll bring all of my pain killers from last time. That would be so funny. They’d freak out.

Contact someone in the NHCAA, and they will usually be able to get your bill lowered to the actual price of the items.

Well we use the insurance but being that it does run up costs we try to bring what we can of our own. No sense in insurance paying $30 for a tube of diaper rash cream when I have 3 tubes at home.

haha..yeah, i could see some people freaking out over that. It is a liability thing, from their standpoint. I’d bring what I have and play it by ear.

Archer

NHCAA? I don’t think it’s fraud, it’s just the unfortunate cost of business these days. If every insured person reimbursed the hospital for cost of materials alone, there would be no hospitals. I’d be interested to see how often people have their bills lowered by them.

Archer

Yet another reason I want to have my baby at home … with a midwife. Argh. God, please.

Archer, does that mean I am paying the pharmacist $650 for the hour it took him to prepare the shot? Who was telling Jonny he should be a dentist instead of a pharmacist? Pharmaceuticals is clearly where the money is.

Not sure about that particular pharmacist billing, but dentistry is a heck of alot more lucrative than being a pharmacist. Most of the cost of drugs is built into the R & D, which averages $800 million before a drug even hits the market..and that includes dozens which fail after hundreds of millions invested…

Archer

Midwives are great…I appreciate the one who taught me more about intra-labor management of uncomplicated deliveries than most of the OB/GYN residents. It’s always important to have hospital back-up, though.

God Bless,

Archer

Oh, that $650 extra was for the hospital-delivered rhogam. Well, what I said about R and D applies, but that extra is due to what I talked about before..the unfortunate cost of business.

Just one way hospital costs go up, which is often overlooked due to a mindset of entitlement amongst the general population, is the ER “business model”. One of the hospitals I work at sees 120,000 patients a year in the ER. We collect 15% of what we bill. Can you imagine what would happen if farmer joe at the corner store only collected 15%? He’d have to raise costs of everything to giant levels..or else go out of business. Hospitals such as the one I work at cannot go out of business, because the cost of going out of business would far outweigh the cost of raised prices. It’s not a fun situation, and has many many factors. It’s bad for doctors, bad for patients..and it needs to be fixed.

God Bless ,

Archer

I want, no I demand, nationalised healthcare!

Arch, how do you suggest fixing it? I’m thinking only allow charity hospitals, but I know that a great many of those don’t do any charity work whatsoever and they still pay their executives exorbitant amounts of money. On a different note, the hospital that we briefly used in Ft. Worth (a charity hospital) had a nice clear bill with separate charges for each drug Sarah was given, as well as reasonable prices. Labyrinth billing schems can’t be good for anyone but the hospitals.

No, I do not support your call for the government to become everyone’s
nanny. Rather, I call on Christian people and Christian churches to teach
their fellowman enough character so that they will pay their bills. If even
just the Christians would start doing this, it would cut our costs (and our
prices) by over half.

There are alot of things that needs to be done, as the problem is multi-factorial. Costs to the healthcare system include R&D of drugs, excessive legal litigation, ineffeciency at the level of the government and 3rd party payer bureaucracies, an environment in which patients don’t pay for any of their healthcare, insurance companies which refuse to pay doctors what is rightly owed to them….Alot of problems. In any other field, people would be screaming bloody murder if they only recouped 15% of what they billed. Doctors, unfortunately, are not very skilled at standing up for themselves..That’s a whole ‘nother ballgame, though.

Hospitals are businesses, just like any other. If they lose money somewhere, they must make it up somewhere else, or go under! When they make a profit, everyone is better off. The better the business is run, the better the services, and that makes everyone, both doctors and patients, much better in the long run.

I really, really don’t think that hospitals should be “business.” I mean, I think compensation for services is demanded, but healthcare shouldn’t be driven by the bottom line. It creates too many conflicts of interest.

Any time services are exchanged for goods, it’s a business. If the government runs a hospital, it’s still a business, but it’s a subsidized and far more inefficient business. Why work harder if I’m not compensated for my work, but paid a salary?

Anytime that business is better run, with more profits, everyone is better off, in fact, it eliminates conflicts of interests, especially in the area of medicine.

Let’s say I’m a family practice doc. In order to break even, I have to see approximately 50 patients a day, and that doesn’t include the patients I have to round on in the hospital in the morning or at night. Now, lets say I get more compensation per patient. This allows me to see greater profits, which can be turned into fewer patients seen per day. What does that mean? Greater time per patient, allowing for more doctor-patient relationship, more time devoted to diagnosis and treatment, leading to fewer errors. Fewer errors leads to less litigation, which drives down costs even more, leading to greater profits. Additionally, I’d have more time to do things for fun, which would lead to a happier doctor, leading to better care overall, happier patients, etc. A beautiful cycle.

Aside from the better healthcare provided from a better business of healthcare, it’s just better practical Biblical living. Christians need to be the ones leading the way, showing the moral character of being a good businessperson, and hopefully driving a capitalistic economy which leads to greater prosperity in all areas of the world.

“On a different note, the hospital that we briefly used in Ft. Worth (a charity hospital) had a nice clear bill with separate charges for each drug Sarah was given, as well as reasonable prices. Labyrinth billing schems can’t be good for anyone but the hospitals.”

Hospitals are required by law to give itemized bills when a patient requests them.

I’ve found that hospitals’ definitions of itemized are not standardized.

Arch, I think you are confounding doctors’ practices and hospitals. They’re not quite the same. And I’m probably in favor of separating them even further.

I was speaking to the business of healthcare across the entire system. More and more doctors are doing hospital-based practices alone…and many more recieve a substantial amount based on their inpatient services. Everything is tied together compensation wise through insurance companies, medicare, and medicaid. Therefore, I’d say the principles apply in either situation, as they are both businesses which need to be run well in order to maximize patient and physician gains.

I’m pretty happy with our heathcare system here in Canada. It costs nothing (out of pocket–it’s “paid for” by taxes, of course) to give birth; midwives, home birth, &c. are included in that, being covered by MSP (our evil Commie nationalized health care system which covers everyone). Come on, you know you want to move here and be my neighbours already.