Beginning to feel better after out patient back surgery until the post appeared in the mail box. More than $54,000.00 is the bill so far. The cost of feeling better is outrageous, it seems. Thanks heavens for insurance and Medicare, but really?

You shouldn't take the figures too seriously.

What happens is the hospitals and doctors post nominal prices but the actual payments are a fraction of those numbers. The insurance companies and Medicare have agreements with providers with caps on charges.

Depending on how long you were in the OR, the price would be as little as $10,000.

The health care system in the USA is horribly convoluted and ineffective.

That alone is reason to consider which politicians favor lining the pockets of health care, pharma and insurance lobbyists. Too many people are going bankrupt trying to pay for even one medical crisis.

the fact that u. s. americans ~



still have to pay for they free health care ~



is proof ~



that there is no god ~




#there is no god

It's not free. It's inequitable and designed to funnel money away from poor to the rich.

I don't know what "no god" has to do with it. Jesus isn't exactly helping anything, if that's what you mean.

ziller has been appending "#there is no god" to a lot of his posts recently. What he does is to state something trivial and then pretend that to atheists the silly complaint is proof that God does not exist. Thus

~ It rained today ~

# there is no god

He thinks that trivializing the problems others have with God proves that there is a God. And that God is exactly as ziller says: no one else is qualified to interpret the Bible, no other faith is true.

It's part of a bigger pattern, one that I just recognized the other day. ziller dislikes almost all authority figures. He hates Mormonism, despises Catholicism, and recently ridiculed Queen Elizabeth. Yes, Queen Elizabeth, a dead woman who is no threat to anybody and yet somehow arouses his ire--probably because a lot of people really like her. In fact, the only authority structure of which ziller approves is the flavor of Christianity he represents.

The extension of his antipathy to a harmless corpse awakened me to the fact I've met people like him before. They generally come from homes in which there is an authority figure who doesn't give the child the approbation that all children need to develop healthily. That child then grows up with a pronounced resentment towards organized authority, gets petty revenge against the offending family member by embracing causes s/he frowns upon, and then seeks to establish him or herself as the true authority by dint of character, insight, or perhaps religious superiority.

I suspect something like that is going on with ziller.

"Queen Elizabeth, a dead woman who is no threat to anybody and yet somehow arouses his ire--probably because a lot of people really like her"

Some people are still sore about the war for independence. Ziller probably watches Mel Gibson in "The Patriot" on DVD.

A lot of people really like Russell M Nelson too. Should that stop us for ridiculing the church? Well okay, probably. But it's so much fun.

Not at all. Nelson is a threat to people.

I don’t care much one way or the other about Elizabeth either. But she is not a danger to anyone.

What I am saying is that there is a reason ziller assails all other authority figures and ridicules everyone else’s problems with God. And it has nothing to do with Liz and in fact little to do with God.

I am explaining to Dagny why ziller trivializes us.

>ziller has been appending "#there is no god" to a lot of his posts recently

I agree with your take. Well explained.

Weirdly, whenever he does that, he seems to imply (to me anyway) how impotent his God actually is.

I get that I will not be billed that amount but that is the bill that will be submitted to insurance and Medicare. By any measure I find it outrageous.

Insurance companies and Medicare will pay much less than the headline numbers. They never pay the rack rate.

ETA: The individual--in this case, you--is the only one who will come close to paying what you are billed. The big institutions never do.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/14/2022 09:54PM by Lot's Wife.

Understand all that but outrageous billing designed, I think, to game the system which hurts everyone e in the long run. Except perhaps the doctors who know how to play the game and inflate bills to settle for what they want in the first place.

Medicare kicked in and fixed my prostate cancer, removed a recalcitrant gall-damn it bladder and one other operation, all for $450 of my dollars.

The Socialism of the aged works for me!!

Me too, total hysterectomy $154 out of pocket.

That was the bill for a few hours worth of work. Imagine the bill for the anti-vaxxers who got hit hard by Covid and ended up in the ICU for 3-4 months (and then on to a long term care facility, in some cases.)

I'm at a loss as to why the U.S. people are so opposed to nationalized health care.

they were life flighting our son to SLC, he said that's $10,000. My son is on Medicaid. He is 36. Thank goodness he is on Medicaid. The bill for life flight was $38,000.

IHC set things up so that they only have one EEG in Logan and two technicians. They have 24-hour EEGs in SLC with technicians reading the results. They've moved the BIG issues all to one place. IMC. I tend to believe they did this for the idea of life flight. I hear that helicopter fly over our house several times a day.

They thought our son was still having seizures as he had had 3 or 4. His legs were jerking. That is why they sent him down. Per the EEG down there, he never had seizure while in SLC and we had seen his legs jerking a lot down there. He also had white blood cells in his cerebrospinal fluid, so they had diagnosed him with meningitis, but they didn't know if it was bacterial or viral. Luckily, his was viral and he got over it.

I just went on Medicare, as did the "husband." Our deductible prior to this was paid by the drug company who makes his medication. I've only said I think once on here that he has HIV. (Of course, I'm the one who opened the letter stating he had it some 11 years ago. Long story on how that happened.) So NOW he's trying to find a way to get his drug paid for with other sources as it will cost $5000 out of pocket a year. I have many more things wrong with me and my out of pocket is $10 a month.

I can't remember how much the rest of the bills were. I'm sure the "husband" has them filed.