* IN THE USA
Yeah but soon to be in Canada and other countries with socialized medicine because the idiots somehow think the US is better off (despite all meaningful metrics to the contrary).
The USA doesn’t use metric, so you can’t use their metrics.
*Taps forehead meme
The doctor has no idea what anything costs
Edit: unless it’s a one of the admin slash doctors or a private practice
And, more to the point, is the last person that’s going to deign to spend their extremely overbooked (by the same admins) time directly communicating with patients about anything that’s not the literal bare minimum diagnosis / prognosis/ treatment plan.
Incorrect. Doctors don’t know the cost of anything 😅
Is this an american meme i am too Australian to understand
It is, yeah. American healthcare is insanely expensive.
Doctor doesn’t tell people what they owe, it’s usually the billing department or their office manager who does (at least in the US)
Source: This was my job after college. I worked for a mental hospital, and it was my job to tell people how much their hospital stay was going to cost. A lot of the time, these patients were hospitalized because they’ve tried to commit suicide. So glad I don’t work there anymore.
Thank you. Physicians are just employees of the hospital like nurses. They can try to keep the cost down by not ordering unneeded tests, but a majority of the time they can’t do anything about prices.
Whats cool is that physicians aren’t allowed to own hospitals due to fear of “greed”. But people whose entire career is business and making money can :).
A baker can own a bakery, a lawyer can own a law firm, a doctor can’t own a hospital.
The US is a mess.
Doctors can run their own practice.
They did usually end up paying or not?
For some of them, I was able to sign them up for Medicaid, so their stay could be covered. Lots of people set up payment plans. For the people who didn’t/couldn’t pay, we would send them to collections. My hospital very, very rarely wrote anyone off. IIRC the cost for one night without insurance was around $4k.
I’m trying to imagine what it would be like for them to be that low in life, attempt suicide, end up hospitalized, then hit with a massive bill to crush them further. Some countries do a much better job at caring for their population than others, that’s for sure.
For sure! It was definitely soul crushing, watching what very little hope people had being quashed by the ridiculousness that is US healthcare system. There were many times where we’d call to collect from patients and we’d speak with loved ones who told us that the patient ended up killing themselves shortly after discharge.
What’s even more infuriating is that my coworkers and I made about $16/hr while our CEO raked in $150k+ a year.
It’s really not the doctors charging crazy amounts, it’s the hospitals. MBA types got into medicine and squeeze it like any other industry. GI does a scope? Doc gets $200 for doing the procedure, facility gets $5k for a facility fee.
100% agree here. As someone who has worked in medical billing, unless it’s a small private practice (in which case it would not apply here), the doctors don’t give a shit about you paying the bill.
There is a whole department of people who specialize in nickel and diming every possible thing that was with range of you, at a markup that would make any decent person blush.
Then that money goes to the hospital to turn an insane profit.
a quintessentially American meme
