I was looking at our checkbook yesterday and it occurred to me that I have no idea how much money it costs to be in the hospital for an indefinite period.
Three weeks ago we were there for about 8 hours. Nurse check, practitioner check, doctor on call check. Get a room, wait and monitor. Nothing happening, go home. (This apparently is known as “the drill” as in “Well, you have placenta previa, you know the drill.”)
I still have no idea how much that short visit cost us (no statements get mailed out until I’ve long forgotten what actually happened). We have insurance, but that’s always made costs less clear to me. I get the whole co-pay thing, but that only really applies to checkups when you aren’t actually sick. If you go into the hospital, you enter this strange financial black hole.
It’s like a dark fog where your checking account goes into escrow and some committee in Delaware looks at the numbers and runs some calculations and makes an automatic withdrawal they consider “pre-authorized” because you pay for insurance. Then you get a statement, kind of like getting the results of a competition except there are no winners. “Look, who knew, the doctor charges $350 for that test, and I didn’t even know we were getting it. But it’s OK, we have insurance, so our portion is…. let’s just see here… pick a number, any number….”
What other industries operate with such a cavernous distance between service and cost? Can you imagine shopping for a refrigerator, getting it home, using it for three months and then getting a statement of benefits where you discover that the cost was $6,040 but that was negotiated down to $3,505, of which your insurance paid 80% of the portion they considered reasonable and customary, the rest of which being applied to your family deductible (your individual deductible already having been met), bringing your total bill (now due please) to a mysterious $657.46 unless you dispute this claim as described in the six pages that follow?
I can.
Checking the mail daily. Hoping for the best.