Actually, it does pay somebody. Unfortunately, that somebody isn’t me. In fact, I’m the one doing the paying (some of it, at least).<\/p>\n
You may recall my mysterious sore throat\/rash combination from a few months ago (wow – has it been that long?). I finally got the bill for my trip to the emergency room and I nearly yelped out loud when I saw it.<\/p>\n
The first thing I should mention is that I have insurance so this is only costing me $60.00.<\/p>\n
The second thing I should mention is that I was only in the emergency room (I was never given an actual\u00a0room in the normal part of the hospital). I was also not given any medication (except for Tylenol), but I was still on IV most of the time\u00a0(I used 4 bags). My entire stay in the emergency room was less than 24 hours (mid-afternoon Saturday through mid-morning Sunday). I was not provided lunch or dinner on Saturday and was only given some cereal, milk and orange juice on Sunday morning as I was sent home.<\/p>\n
In my naive little head, I was expecting such an experience would cost around $2,500 or $3,000. That seemed logical. I mean, there was no surgery. I was basically just being monitored.<\/p>\n
Well, apparently, a few hours of simple monitoring these days is worth $12,907.00. That’s more than a minimum-wage earner makes in an entire\u00a0year! And that’s how much this hospital got for looking at me for\u00a0only 18 hours or so. More infuriating, even at that price the hospital still misdiagnosed me! (my primary care physician confirmed what I had at a follow-up visit to his office on Monday…and it wasn’t what the hospital claimed I had).<\/p>\n
ugh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Actually, it does pay somebody. Unfortunately, that somebody isn’t me. In fact, I’m the one doing the paying (some of it, at least). You may recall my mysterious sore throat\/rash combination from a few months ago (wow – has it been that long?). I finally got the bill for my trip to the emergency room […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}