The Charlotte Observer Karen Garloch column
By Karen Garloch, The Charlotte Observer | |
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services |
It was picked up by
"After hearing about the
He was responding to the story of
Sending bills with charges that seem unrelated to anything is the modus operandi for U.S. hospitals, and it doesn't make sense to anybody.
'Something really wrong'
Another reader wrote to say he was "wholly unsurprised by the charges."
The Charlotte man, who asked not to be named, said he and his wife took their 2-year-old son to an outpatient surgery center last year to have tubes put in his ears because of frequent infections. The procedure took about 12 minutes, he said. The initial hospital bill was
As in Ferguson's case, the bill was discounted to a smaller "allowable" amount based on the insurer's contract. "The sad thing was they were able to clean out our HRA (health reimbursement account)," the reader wrote. "....We refused to pay any more. They got thousands from us."
More recently, he said he was quoted
While I didn't spend as much time checking on his story as I did Ferguson's, it's similar to many I've heard over the years. Hospitals often can't tell you how much a procedure will cost before you have it, and afterward, it's hard to make sense of the bills you get. Charges for similar procedures vary widely from region to region. A good dose of price transparency could help us all become better consumers.
Jumper cables for a snake bite?
Some responses to the column were unrelated to the cost of care.
Several hours later, Atkinson wrote, the vet called and said he "felt like an idiot," but he took the dog and an assistant out to his pickup truck and followed the instructions in the article. "He hooked jumper cables to the battery in his pickup and put two screwdrivers in the other ends. He then shocked my dog around the site of the bite. He said that she never had any swelling or loss of appetite and I could pick her up after work," Atkinson wrote.
Atkinson said the now-retired vet told him that he and his fellow bird hunters always lost a lot of dogs to snake bites during their hunting trips, but since he learned about the shock treatment, they hadn't lost one.
I found many online references to this "treatment," which was reported by a medical missionary in the British journal Lancet. But an article at herper.com (a website about herpetology, the study of reptiles and amphibians) dismisses the treatment as ineffective and possibly dangerous, not to mention painful. (Ginger could not be reached for comment.)
The snake bite column also prompted another question unrelated to the size of the bill: What kind of snake?
Ferguson said it was a copperhead.
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