The cost of getting minor outpatient surgery at Sacred Heart Hospital (the hospital which a report Mr. Ichi cited yesterday is one of the "most affordable" hospitals in the state)

I had what is called a Sentinel Lymph Node biopsy.
A surgeon cut a little slit under my arm and removed a lymph node and had it biopsied while I was still under the anesthesia.  And after the biopsy came back negative he sewed me up.  That was it.

What you see below are the medical bills.

The last bill is the surgeon's bill which I have already paid so that is not included in the total.

The total of all hospital charges including anesthesiology is $28,963.
Sacred Heart Hospital and all the other relevant providers are in my insurance company's PPO network.  That means the insurance company has negotiated a price on each item with the hospital.  After the insurance company has negotiated the prices on each item,  and paid a trivial amount toward each charge,  my co-pay on everything totals up to $19,899.  That means for a simple sentinel lymph node biopsy, I will be paying just shy of $20,000 out of my pocket.  And when I add the amount of what I have already paid the surgeon ($631),  that amount will now total more than $20,000.

And remember,  Sacred Hospital is listed in this survey as "one of the most affordable hospitals in the state"...



And also remember,  that I have health insurance and I paid $4500 last April to renew my policy for a year.  AND EVEN STILL,  IT WILL COST ME OVER $20,000 OUT OF MY POCKET FOR A SIMPLE LYMPH NODE BIOPSY!

What is the moral of this story,  you might ask.  Well here it is.

Regardless if we have obamacare or don't have obamacare.  Regardless if obama is president or ted cruz is president.  Regardless if Sean Hannity is president or Rachel Maddow is president or Ron Paul is president.  Regardless of republicans or democrats or libertarians or tea partys.  Regardless of Capitalism or communism.  Regardless of christianity or muslimism.  REGARDLESS OF ANY OF THAT FUCKING SHIT,  THE COST OF MEDICAL CARE IS OUT OF CONTROL AND IT'S GOING TO BANKRUPT THIS COUNTRY.  PERIOD.  

I accidentally submitted the post before I got all the statements displayed.
So if you're not seeing all the statements yet just wait a few minutes till I edit and get them all in the post.

It's unbelievable. You have outpatient surgery and every department gets a slice of the pie....a big slice.

REGARDLESS OF ANY OF THAT FUCKING SHIT, THE COST OF MEDICAL CARE IS OUT OF CONTROL AND IT'S GOING TO BANKRUPT THIS COUNTRY. PERIOD.
Well said Mr Bob Well said......


But I am glad you were able to use one of the more affordable hospitals. You could have run up a hell of a bill.

Joanimaroni wrote:It's unbelievable.

To really appreciate how unbelievable it is,  let's put it in perspective.

I own two vehicles.  I paid 10 grand for a Toyota Prius and 4 grand for a Toyota Tundra.

Two very nice good running vehicles,  a car and a truck,  cost me $14,000.

This goddamn motherfucking cocksucking cunt licking little biopsy costs me over $20,000.

At a so-called "non-profit" hospital run by a fucking church that don't pay no goddamn taxes!

well you cant blame pathology, they got ripped off as usual.

looks like you had 3 biopsies, one dissection and 2 smaller biopsies with frozens, 3 IHC's.

You should call them and ask them what the E0360 CPT is for.

personally I think your ins sucks. anyway when I get to work ill look up the other CPTs if you want and maybe you should try to negotiate with them. No not maybe, you should try and negotiate with them.

And think about this. Only a few dozen people at most will see these actual bills and read this.

Millions of people will instead listen to sean hannity and ross limbaugh and rachel maddow and ed schultz and barrack obama and ted cruz and sarah palin and hillary clinton run their goddamn mouths about health care and when they run their goddamn mouths it will all equal up to one big fat fucking nothingness.

Chrissy wrote:well you cant blame pathology, they got ripped off as usual.

looks like you had 3 biopsies, one dissection and 2 smaller biopsies with frozens, 3 IHC's.

You should call them and ask them what the E0360 CPT is for.

personally I think your ins sucks. anyway when I get to work ill look up the other CPTs if you want and maybe you should try to negotiate with them. No not maybe, you should try and negotiate with them.

I will gladly welcome any information you or anyone else can provide me to help me understand this.  Because I sure aint gonna get any worthwhile information from sean hannity or rachel maddow or barack obama or ted cruz.

Bob wrote:And think about this.  Only a few dozen people at most will see these actual bills and read this.

Millions of people will instead listen to sean hannity and ross limbaugh and rachel maddow and ed schultz and barrack obama and ted cruz and sarah palin and hillary clinton run their goddamn mouths about health care and when they run their goddamn mouths it will all equal up to one big fat fucking nothingness.

hey look on the bright side. You don't have metastatic melanoma and now you are going to get your gov subsidy. which wont make the cost of healthcare go down but only up as we have seen in the past. but you don't need to worry, those subsidies will be paid by the working calls tax payers.  

see, life is good. and you should have gotten that second opinion.... 

Bob I worked in the frickin medical system and I saw so much of this extortion it made my blood boil. Why do you think I hate it so much. You are no longer a patient you are a victim a sucker a mark. They can kill you and they still collect, The problem is they very often do kill the patient. The book that woke me up was CONFESSIONS OF A MEDICAL HERETIC. It says the patient is the sacrifice in the temple of medicine.... All that money and it was benign....I had a black doctor in Selma Al. remove a tumor for me while I was installing an xray unit for him. He looked at it said it's not cancerous and charged me nothing. Then he rolled up his sleeves and helped me finish the installation. Oh yeah he delivered a baby the next day for free. Yeah there used to be some good doctors out there, Doctors like Dr. Thames in Milton who delivered a lot of babies for the poor for practically nothing.

Bob wrote:

Chrissy wrote:well you cant blame pathology, they got ripped off as usual.

looks like you had 3 biopsies, one dissection and 2 smaller biopsies with frozens, 3 IHC's.

You should call them and ask them what the E0360 CPT is for.

personally I think your ins sucks. anyway when I get to work ill look up the other CPTs if you want and maybe you should try to negotiate with them. No not maybe, you should try and negotiate with them.

I will gladly welcome any information you or anyone else can provide me to help me understand this.  Because I sure aint gonna get any worthwhile information from sean hannity or rachel maddow or barack obama or ted cruz.

Good advice from chrissy. Go in person and dress down. Don't be put off by some low level lackey... work ur way up.

Bob wrote:

Chrissy wrote:well you cant blame pathology, they got ripped off as usual.

looks like you had 3 biopsies, one dissection and 2 smaller biopsies with frozens, 3 IHC's.

You should call them and ask them what the E0360 CPT is for.

personally I think your ins sucks. anyway when I get to work ill look up the other CPTs if you want and maybe you should try to negotiate with them. No not maybe, you should try and negotiate with them.

I will gladly welcome any information you or anyone else can provide me to help me understand this.  Because I sure aint gonna get any worthwhile information from sean hannity or rachel maddow or barack obama or ted cruz.

No problem, I would be glad to help.

at least that way you can go in armed with knowing what each code was for. I can already and have told you that the pathology fees are very reasonable, which always pisses me off because its pathology that actually does all the hard work and makes you diagnosis. The OR took you to the bank though.

Best healthcare system in the world!

boards of FL wrote:Best healthcare system in the world!  

You cant equate best with money. two different animals.

boards of FL wrote:Best healthcare system in the world!

It is what it was regulated to be. The average joe didn't have a seat at that table.

Chrissy wrote:

boards of FL wrote:Best healthcare system in the world!  

You cant equate best with money. two different animals.

You said a lot right there...go to Germany or South America and get it done...it costs a lot less and is practically the same.

Chrissy wrote:No problem, I would be glad to help.

at least that way you can go in armed with knowing what each code was for. I can already and have told you that the pathology fees are very reasonable, which always pisses me off because its pathology that actually does all the hard work and makes you diagnosis. The OR took you to the bank though.

Thanks again, for offering to help me, Chrissy. Anything you can provide will help. You can either post it here or email it to me. I am right now going to PM you my email address.

TEOTWAWKI wrote:

Chrissy wrote:

boards of FL wrote:Best healthcare system in the world!  

You cant equate best with money. two different animals.

You said a lot right there...go to Germany or South America and get it done...it costs a lot less and is practically the same.

No thanks. America has the highest survival rate for cancer.
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba596

and if you want a organ transplant, America is the place to be.

Im off to work now, have fun.  

Chrissy wrote:

TEOTWAWKI wrote:

Chrissy wrote:

boards of FL wrote:Best healthcare system in the world!  

You cant equate best with money. two different animals.

You said a lot right there...go to Germany or South America and get it done...it costs a lot less and is practically the same.

No thanks. America has the highest survival rate for cancer.
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba596

and if you want a organ transplant, America is the place to be.

Im off to work now, have fun.  

America also probably has the most cancer and the best medical propaganda of any country...

The highest survival rates were found in the U.S. for breast and prostate cancer, in Japan for colon and rectal cancers in men, and in France for colon and rectal cancers in women, Coleman's team reports.

In Canada and Australia, survival was also high for most cancers.

The lowest cancer survival rates for all four cancers were found in Algeria.

Bob,
Thank you for posting this information. People think our health system is the best in the world. It is not. People think the Affordable Care Act is not popular, and they are wrong. People everyday are facing poor quality care, misdiagnosis, and out of control inflation of cost in a medical system which quite frankly is barely working. Now the oligarchy tried to convince folks that the out of control costs were because of malpractice, yet try to get public peer review of every doctor so that the bad ones can be identified. It will not happen. A sub par medical policy will not be available through the exchanges. The one good thing about the Affordable Care Act is that it standardized coverage, and actually provides coverage.

You were being responsible by purchasing health insurance. You were not a dead beat. Yet this fiasco happened, and all the while you could have been facing a terminal spread of cancer. I will give you one method of how you can cut your payment in half. Explain that you can take some money out of your qualified retirement plan, but you have no other available cash to pay what the insurance company does not pay. Tell them that you have consulted with a bankruptcy attorney(so you do not tell a lie, please to a phone consultation with a bk attorney). Offer to pay them 7k for a lump sum. They will counter in the 10 to 15 range. stick to your guns and say......no you do not understand. I only have 7k.

They will negotiate and settle. Therein lies the reason healthcare is out of control. Hospitals having to collect from people with no insurance or crap insurance.....and into this mess comes a solution and first step in the Affordable Care Act.

Chrissy wrote:hey look on the bright side. You don't have metastatic melanoma and now you are going to get your gov subsidy. which wont make the cost of healthcare go down but only up as we have seen in the past. but you don't need to worry, those subsidies will be paid by the working calls tax payers.  

see, life is good. and you should have gotten that second opinion.... 

I was in a "gray" area. The dermatologist who removed the melanoma said I didn't need to do any more diagnosis. But the Sacred Heart oncology department recommended that I do the SNL biopsy.

Because I did the biopsy, pathology then discovered that I have a second form of cancer, Lymphoma.
But that would have been discovered anyway because I had already done a blood test which revealed a high white cell count and further testing would have confirmed the lymphoma even if I had chosen not to do the SNL biopsy. And the version of Lymphoma I have ("Non Hodgkins CLL") is not something that requires further diagnosis and treatment early so it wouldn't have made any difference when it was diagnosed.

SO, the $20,000 this is going to cost me is all for nothing. I should have taken the advice of the dermatologist and not done this nonsense.

2seaoat wrote:Bob,
Thank you for posting this information.  People think our health system is the best in the world.  It is not.  People think the Affordable Care Act is not popular, and they are wrong.  People everyday are facing poor quality care, misdiagnosis, and out of control inflation of cost in a medical system which quite frankly is barely working.   Now the oligarchy tried to convince folks that the out of control costs were because of malpractice, yet try to get public peer review of every doctor so that the bad ones can be identified.  It will not happen.  A sub par medical policy will not be available through the exchanges.  The one good thing about the Affordable Care Act is that it standardized coverage, and actually provides coverage.

You were being responsible by purchasing health insurance.  You were not a dead beat.  Yet this fiasco happened, and all the while you could have been facing a terminal spread of cancer.  I will give you one method of how you can cut your payment in half.  Explain that you can take some money out of your qualified retirement plan, but you have no other available cash to pay what the insurance company does not pay.  Tell them that you have consulted with a bankruptcy attorney(so you do not tell a lie, please to a phone consultation with a bk attorney).  Offer to pay them 7k for a lump sum.   They will counter in the 10 to 15 range.  stick to your guns and say......no you do not understand.   I only have 7k.

They will negotiate and settle.  Therein lies the reason healthcare is out of control.  Hospitals having to collect from people with no insurance or crap insurance.....and into this mess comes a solution and first step in the Affordable Care Act.

Seaoat,

You need to do your homework.  

Obama Inc. Gave Failed ObamaCare Website Company a Sweetheart Deal

Questions were raised before why Obama Inc. suddenly began throwing so much money toward a Canadian company with a poor track record.

   CGI Federal is a subsidiary of Montreal-based CGI Group. With offices in Fairfax, Va., the subsidiary has been a darling of the Obama administration, which since 2009 has bestowed it with $1.4 billion in federal contracts, according to USAspending.gov.

   In comparison, in 2008, under President George W. Bush, CGI contracts totaled only $16.5 million for all federal departments and agencies.

It’s not like CGI Federal could be confused with a good company. There were plenty of warnings throughout the whole process that the whole thing was not going to work.

When Canadian officials in Ontario ran into the same problem with CGI… they fired it.

   Canadian provincial health officials last year fired the parent company of CGI Federal, the prime contractor for the problem-plagued Obamacare health exchange websites, the Washington Examiner has learned.

   CGI Federal’s parent company, Montreal-based CGI Group, was officially terminated in September 2012 by an Ontario government health agency after the firm missed three years of deadlines and failed to deliver the province’s flagship online medical registry.

Obama just kept throwing more taxpayer money at CGI. And the entire ObamaCare setup was reserved for only one company.

   Federal officials considered only one firm to design the Obamacare health insurance exchange website that has performed abysmally since its Oct. 1 debut.

   Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian company with an uneven record of IT pricing and contract performance.

   CMS officials are tight-lipped about why CGI was chosen or how it happened. They also refuse to say if other firms competed with CGI, or if there was ever a public solicitation for building Healthcare.gov, the backbone of Obamacare’s problem-plagued web portal.

   Instead, it appears they used what amounts to a federal procurement system loophole to award the work to the Canadian firm.

   …

   CGI was a much smaller vendor when it was approved by HHS in 2007. With the approval, CGI became eligible for multiple awards without public notice and in circumvention of the normal competitive bidding procurement process.

   …

   There is no evidence CMS issued any public solicitation for the Obamacare website contract.

This smells bad. No, it outright stinks. And it merits a serious investigation. Why did Obama Inc. suddenly begin tossing a ton of work to CGI and practically reserve ObamaCare for them?

   General Accountability Office acting counsel Linda H. Gibson noted that at the time CMS officials had only rated some of CGI’s previous services as “fair.”

But it sounds like their insider Obama contacts were more than unfair.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obama-inc-gave-failed-obamacare-website-company-a-sweetheart-deal/

more...

https://www.google.com/search?q=canada+company+obamacare+website&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

How in the fucking hell is a dysfunctional,  incompetent,  corrupt federal government supposed to do what you claim in your post when this is the only track record obamacare has at this point?

Bob, as you so eloquently phrased it, the medical costs in our country have been and continue to be completely out of control. The medical community is largely responsible as for years they have pressed the envelope as to how much cash they could squeeze out of patient services until now it is in the stratosphere and to pull back from these exorbitant charges have the very same people screaming to high heaven that they are being denied sufficient reimbursements for their services. As usual it is all about money . . . . . show me the money!!!

On a side bar issue related to your bill: last year my wife was hospitalized for an obstructed bowel and stayed in the hospital for nine days ending with a surgical procedure. Our portion owed to the hospital was $14,000. On her discharge I went straight to the business office and asked to have a meet with the Director. I simply stated that we could do this one of two ways, I'll pay this in installments of small increments over a very long period of time OR tell me what you'll settle for as an immediate final payment. I was told they would settle on the spot for $6500 if payment was received within three business days. We shook on it and the issue was settled.