A former US surgeon general says he went to the ER for dehydration and ended up with a $5,000 bill. He called the healthcare sys...
Former US Surgeon General Jerome Adams said he got a $5,000 bill for a recent ER visit, highlighting big problems with the US healthcare system.
Yes it's completely broken, stay hydrated frens!
god damn climate change again
Lmao
Insurance ----- drug patents ---- have broken healthcare.
addicted to the gravy train
🏊♂️😂🤣
Kek!
How did it take him so long to realise this?
Welcome to our nightmare, try 7% on a house mortgage or your tax dollars being stolen to pay for illegal immigrants or endless wars, again, welcome
"Physician, heal thyself".... MEH.... 😉
He’s too busy promoting the 17th booster. He’s a super vaxxer.
TLDR: the good doctor is absolutely right.
This is the first time he ever got to see the bill most likely. I didn't appreciate it until I had a similar situation. You have to become a patient to understand why patients go broke. You can know it intellectually, academically, from reading it, but you don't really understand it until you live through it and see it with your own eyes.
It just so happens I had a similar incident. Chronic diarrhea lead to acute dehydration and brown urine with tinged blood. Acute kidney injury. So off I went to the ER to get worked up. I was severely dehydrated, so I ended up getting a couple of bags of saline IV and it fixed me right up. I was examined by a 4th year medical student on ER rotation (fine, he was more than capable, personable, and very thorough). I was overseen by a 2nd year resident. Again, fine. He was more than capable, but not as personable as the med student. They worked me up properly, made the correct diagnosis, and gave me the right treatment. I was in the bed for ~3 hours start to finish. My bill (10 years ago or so) was $5K and change. Insurance covered most of it. I worked for the hospital, so I expected them to cover it all, but lol, no.
Regardless, for 3 hours of ER time, two cheap blood tests, an IV set and 2 bags of saline, I got a bill for over $5K. I never saw the ER physician. That service doesn't cost $5K, even if you factor in egregious per minute operating costs to keep an ER open (staffing, facilities, that kind of overhead). Not even close. I should have paid no more than 10% of that.
So, why did I pay more? Because paying customers subsidize the non-payers and the underpayers. Every time Medicare pays 81 cents on the dollar that's billed, every time Medicaid pays 68 cents on the dollar, every "free" visit for a homeless person or illegal alien for their snot-nosed kid with a cold, that cost gets added up and distributed to the bills of people with "good" insurance who can pay. Honest people go bankrupt trying to pay their medical bills while the government (politicians) makes promises to people that the taxpayer has to keep. And when the taxpayer can't keep them because we're a broke AF debtor nation, the honest, paying customers get to pick up the slack.
Now, to be clear, I was at a non-profit hospital. The issue of gov't subsidizing a "for profit" system is even more morally outrageous. They're typically the worst offenders. They're not serving "the underserved" (which is a bullshit distinction, but it does mean they must take the charity cases and can't legally shunt them away) like the non-profits are. They charge the gov't which underpays and then they pass on their profit margin "cost" to the payers. This is a huge driver of your insurance premiums going skyhigh after HusseinCare, btw.
He went to the ER instead of just drinking more water?
exactly, pedialyte or gatorade. Stuff like that. As a doctor he should have known better. They probably ran a bunch of tests on him, believing he had insurance.
Being a doctor he could have given himself a saline IV.
I know some that treat their hangovers that way.
I know paramedics and EMTs that have also.
Them too!
There is not a lot of information in that article, so I can assume he didn't realize he was dehydrated and he was suffering a symptom that was cause for concern.
Depends on how bad you get. Believe me. Sometimes, you need the ER and IV fluids, especially if you're really depleted or if whatever's depleting you hasn't stopped. You can't get water back in fast enough and if you try, you mess up your electrolytes. Gatorade alone doesn't cut it if your kidneys are already shutting down.
Dale Folwell, the best Treasurer that NC has ever had, has been on a holy war against the health cartels for years. His examples of bankruptcies ruthlessly driven by them are too many and hard to listen to.
Health care should be ours, not tied to any employer. Health insurance should cover catastrophe, like every other type of insurance. They've conditioned people that everything is a catastrophe, everything is chronic, nothing is ever healed, only symptoms are managed. All costs should be transparent.
Trump mandated what Congress obviously should have passed long ago- the US should not be paying more than any other country for any drugs. There should be no limits on what patients can try. Vets should be able to find their care anywhere. There should be full transparency on medical bills, every single line.
He should have said he's a "migrant", then he'd not have to pay anything.
You just figuring that out? How the hell were you surgeon general?
Welcome to Obummer care
Surgeon General ignores routine health. Gets upset when he goes to emergency services and they bill him accordingly.
Nah shits too expensive
It's not fully broken...
It's that us citizens have to pay for losers without jobs or healthcare. They use ER for sniffles and bail on the bill.
Hospital cannot operate for free. So people who DO pay, have to also pay for the deadbeats.
At that price, even a glass of printer ink would have been cheaper
There giving illegals debit cards ,medical care in Veteran's Hospitals,three hots and a cot ,it's not broken ,it's intentional,The Jabbed are being replaced as we speak,CAN YOU SEE IT YET. Remember the video that came out a year and a half or so with the lady that said she was in Hiring of Employees for large Corporations and said all the CEO'S told her that in about three years or so there would be alot of openings .
if his back was wet... there would have been no charge.... except to the taxpayers.
If you're old and have lots of cash. They will keep you doped up and have you stay for ages as they rack up the hospital bill. This happened to a family member. A well respected Doctor friend had to demand they stop giving her anything. She woke up and was fine. The bill was $180k and it would have been more if they were not stopped.
A retired RN I knew, who was of the highest moral character, said the same to me when she was treated for cancer at a prestigious local hospital. She was very distressed about how she was treated. The hospital staff did this despite her own medical background. Her words for one of the nurses there were particularly harsh. This was nearly 40 years ago.
I was hospitalized with what they called COVID pneumonia, even though I had no trouble breathing at all. The nurse would come in every morning and say, "You're going to die today!" And I would say, very aggressively, "NO I'M NOT!" I reported her to the charge nurse and she disappeared. And I didn't die!
It only cost $20 for a box of Pedialyte sticks. 😂😂😂
Someone told me a story where they had a cut on their leg. The ER person circled the area with a marker and told them to go home. The bill was $6,000. Thanks Obama.
PS. Healthcare workers aren’t getting paid well, where is this money going?.
It’s high time that the entire medical system be reimagined. A new system without big pharma and the Rockefeller Foundation at its core is long overdue.
If the C19 scamdemic proved anything, it showed the corruption that happens when human health becomes nothing more than a corporate profit center and humans reduced to lab mice.
Medical ethics need codified into law so that those prescribing drugs including vaccines have personal liability for their decisions and can’t be ordered by others under mandates, protocols or “standards of care” to do something they disagree with.
All clinicians should be in private practice, free of governmental, corporate or institutional interference to do their best to serve the needs of their patients and nobody else. Hospitals should be community, not corporate owned.
Much can be done to improve patient satisfaction and outcomes by removing the undue influence of big pharma, insurance companies and bureaucrats. Medical schools need to remove the yoke of big pharma dictating curricula. Equal emphasis should be placed on natural remedies, nutrition, exercise and healthy lifestyle to minimize the need for costly drugs and procedures.
This should be a top priority of the. next Trump administration. The entire country would benefit by removing healthcare from bureaucrats and profiteers and the gangsters that control them.
That is something all of us have known for a long time.. overcharges made up charges.. greedy and we are the ones who are caught in the middle.. Insurance companies don't want to pay hogh prices and anything they do pay you have to. It is total garbage..
He did an emergency visit to the mayo clinic.
No shit Sherlock. If you didn't know that was gonna cost you, you're an idiot.
I would have stayed home and drank fruit juice with salt, with water chasers.
Saying you went to the ER for ‘dehydration’ makes you a f’ing pussy or a liar. If he had abdominal pain and had an extensive workup and CT, the bill would likely be 5K. If he was just dehydrated and got some labs/zofran/IV fluids, then the bill is usually around $1500. So, maybe he’s actually a lying pussy? Idk. But, yes, the ER is expensive. Thank you captain obvious.
The helfcare system is not coming to the rescue. We are the healthcare rescue party, it seems to me.
Drink water or go to an iv drip place retard
The illegals wouldn't say it's broken, works perfect for them, free!
Very ineffective SG!!
hospital/doctor business is totally at the knees of the lawyers and insurance companies and medicare/medicaid as well as big pharma......they practice defensive medicine....so they run cat scans and mri's on people who don't need them and prescibe antibiotics to people with a virus all to the tune of you don't want to be accused of not giving the best care...
the populace has been groomed to demand pills, scans, therapies, etc whether they would do any good or not....they just want SOMETHING...
so we need to look into the mirror.
I have trouble taking anyone in a bow tie seriously.
I think I identified another cause. That a former SURGEON GENERAL, after feeling light headed after PHYSICAL EXERTION OUTSIDE, decided THE EMERGENCY ROOM was a sensible option.