What's the big deal? The hospital says $120k for anti-venom. The insurance company looks it up on their chart and says, 'Sorry, we pay $3,500 for anti-venom. Here it is.' The hospital sheepishly takes the money and moves on. I can see how it's news in Norway because they just found out our medical industry is messed up. No one in the US should be surprised.
Here is a more detailed article plus cool slide show of hot girl bitten by snake! http://www.examiner.com/article/student-bitten-by-rattlesnake-la-jolla-calif-gets-143k-hospital-bill
Thirteen Steps For Making U.S. Child Care As Horrible As U.S. Health Care Nancy Pelosi once had trouble finding a babysitter. So her aspiration these days is "doing for child care what we did for health care reform"—pushing a comprehensive solution. In fact, it's not just an aspiration—it's at the top of her agenda. This sounds like an absolutely wonderful idea. But if "we" really are going to do for child care what we have done for health care, the U.S. will have to take some intermediate steps in order to replicate the experience faithfully. (1) First, the U.S. should create a labor shortage by launching a major war and drafting men and women to fight. (2) Then it should impose wage and price controls, as Washington did during WWII, to prevent employers from bidding up the price of labor. (That would further drive up the prices for war materiel, which would be costly and inconvenient to the government. The Emergency Price Control Act of 1942, for instance, stipulated that its aim was "to assure that defense appropriations are not dissipated by excessive prices.") (3) The president—Barack Obama, presumably—should then establish a War Manpower Commission with the power to forbid people to change jobs, as just such a commission did during WWII. This will prevent individuals from skirting around the wage controls by quitting one job to take another that pays more. (4) Practices such as these will encourage employers to compete for scarce labor by offering non-wage benefits. During WWII, employer-provided health coverage was one such benefit. It is reasonable to assume employer-provided child care would be another one today. (5) To facilitate the spread of employer-provided child care, Washington should grant it preferential tax status, as it does with health care. The IRS should back this up by declaring that child-care benefits do not count as wages. (6) To further ensconce the third-party-payer system, the National Labor Relations Board should declare, contra the IRS finding, that child-care benefits do count as wages for the purposes of collective bargaining (just as it did with health coverage). This, combined with the favored tax status, will encourage labor unions to push for extravagantly generous child-care policies for current workers and for pensioners. (7) Washington then should enact two major new entitlement programs akin to Medicaid and Medicare, guaranteeing government-funded babysitting for the poor and elderly. Washington should produce wildly low-balled estimates of the future costs of such programs. (8) While all this is going on, the states should impose complex bureaucratic oversight of the child-care system—especially a "Certificate of Need" program through which bureaucrats, rather than the free market, would decide whether new child-care facilities are needed and may be allowed to open. That way, existing child-care facilities will have government allies in their attempts to limit competition that might hold down costs. (9) Likewise, professional child care associations should lobby Congress for market-entry barriers requiring providers to obtain highly restricted licenses for performing even the most mundane procedures. (10) Meanwhile, politicians at both the state and federal level should propose a host of various mandates on employer-provided child care—requiring such programs to pay for trips to the zoo, cultural institutions and parks; to cover weekend child care for romantic parents' getaways; and to cover full-time au pair services for parents of children with special needs. This will help drive up the cost of insurance even faster. (11) As the share of GNP devoted to child care begins to spiral out of control and the government assumes control of 50 cents out of every child-care dollar, liberals and progressives should argue that this proves the current free market in child care doesn't work, so the government should stop sitting on the sidelines and step in to fix everything. (12) Ideally, the stepping in would consist of a complete government takeover of child care: a single-payer system in which the government does all the child care in the country, and nobody else is allowed to. (13) Short of that, Washington should pass legislation forbidding providers to turn anyone away, and requiring all Americans to buy child-care coverage—whether they have children or not. This should be part of a massive child-care overhaul that will drive costs up even further and prove equally untenable. Then the country can go back and try Step 12—and we will all live happily ever after. Right?
Be a man! what happened to cutting it with a knife and sucking the venom out? seriously, there have been some articles, where in a couple of countries, the doctors were like, "eh, it's just a snake bite. put some windex and take these antibiotics and you will be fine." then the victim has to amputate the leg a week later. So yeah.. at least our doctors are not a complete fail! $143,000 is $137,000 too much.
This is exactly right. The charge that the hospital puts on the bill is just the starting point for negotiation. It might make an interesting headline, but it has no real world meaning.
You declare bankruptcy. A rattlesnake venom costs 100k? That is absurd. How much would it costs to catch even a rare rattle snake?
From my link earleir: http://www.examiner.com/article/student-bitten-by-rattlesnake-la-jolla-calif-gets-143k-hospital-bill According to this document, the FDA approved two intravenous antivenom medications in October 2000. At that time, 1 vial of FabAV (CroFab) costs about $750, and 1 vial of Wyeth-Ayerst's Antivenom Crotalidae Polyvalent (ACP) costs about $600. The scientific study noted that these medications may soon become unavailable due to discontinuation of production. Between 7,000 and 8,000 people are estimated to have been bitten by venomous snakes in the United States each year, and about five of those die, as reported in a 2009 study by the USDA. It is very likely that the cost of continuing to produce an antivenom serum which serves a very limited market has dramatically increased. So they do not want to make the drug in the US, so now they charge an arm and a leg for it. That is nice.
You tell them that you can't or won't pay it. Hell, I've done it for my part of the bill (deductible + out-of-pocket), even when the insurance paid. I got them to cut it from $1200 to $200. Hospitals, furniture stores, and jewelry stores seem to use the same pricing model, where the list price is something insanely high, but you never have to pay the list price. I assume that some suckers do it, and that justifies the practice, but it's stupid.
umm anyone with common sense should realize a 143k bill for one snake bite and one overnight stay is outrageous and that the system is $#%^$#^ up. Also it's a rattle snake in San Diego. It's the most common snake out here in So Cal. Anti-venom is readily available since rattle snake bites happen all the time down here.
What is the profit margin for physicians and hospitals in the US compared to European countries? Also, the reason I used GPs is because it takes 2-5 years longer to train a specialist or sub-specialist, which can be a total of 13-16 of post high school education. The average debt for a medical school student is around $160,000, but if you go to a private medical school, you may be looking at $300,000. Imagine the debt for these specialists. For european countries, it takes less years and you receive education at a much better rate. Moreover, you can't just look at profit margins. Many people in the US will "bust ass" to make more money and therefore better profit margins. If a physician works 80 hours to make say a 30% profit margin vs. one that works 40 hours and make a 20% profit margin, I think that's pretty fair. As for my company, we have a 24% profit margin. While it looks good on the outside, our company, along with other competitors are basically forced to change our business model constantly. Bad working conditions for employees, worse reimbursements, etc. It is really not a good picture and salaries are going down next. What exactly do you do? I understand that it is your job to look at profit margins for hospitals and physicians, but do you understand healthcare policy, healthcare economics, and how the system works?
Do you think the current system should not changed? Should we see health care cost continue to grow as a percent of GPD? From 5% in 1950s to 16% today? Will the country be in good shape if one day Health care is 40 or 50 percent of the GDP?
