European Vacation

Actually, this didn’t happen to me, but it did happen to some friends of mine.

Their son was playing in a pick-up game of basketball, when he was knocked over by a player on the other team. He fell, and got a good knock on the head. No biggie.

Later that day, he was having headaches, that may or may not have been the result of the earlier injury. Being prudent people, his parents took him to the Emergency Room just to be safe – they know that when it comes to closed head injuries, you never want to take a chance.

Well, they held him in the ER for a few hours and observed him. A doctor or 2 stopped by to talk with him. He was even sent for a CAT scan to make certain that his brain was not bleeding or swelling (all the right things to do) After 3 hours in the ER, and with a clean CAT scan, he was pronounced clear of any life-threatening head injury and discharged. Total bill for these 3 hours - $5700.00

Wow. When you think about it, that’s enough to take a family of 4 on a nice cruise. Or buy a reliable used car. Or do lots of other fun things. Of course, being well insured, they had to pay only a 10% co-pay – enough for a nice weekend away.

Don’t get me wrong – they did the right thing by getting their son checked out after his head knock – but WHY does an ER visit cost nearly $6,000.00, especially when 95% of that time was spent just waiting around? Total time spent with a health care professional amounted to about 30 minutes. According to Payscale.com, at the high end of the pay scale, an ER physician gets paid about $140.00 an hour. Nurses and assistants, of course, get paid even less. Let’s be generous here and say that the total personnel costs (doctors, nurses, technicians, administrators, janitors, etc.) cost the hospital $500.00. Kick in a couple of hundred for supplies, etc. This means that the rest of the money, some $5,000.00 went towards running the CAT scan machine and using the facility for a few hours. On paper, at least, it sounds like hospitals are making money faster then the US Mint. Yet, most hospitals are crying the fiscal blues, and many of them are closing their doors as they are no longer fiscally viable.

Something is very, very wrong here….

Very, very wrong ....


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