>>> Don't ever go to the hospital and say "chest pain", you'll have a $7,000 bill quicker than you can run to the door <<<
That's a good example of the costs of defensive medicine. Docs are not allowed to use their judgment, they have to follow protocols. If 1% of chest pain complainers who are sent home would end up having a heart attack, ER docs would have no time to work, they would be spending all their time in lawyers offices. So, they simply throw the book at everyone, with huge numbers of patients with clearly non-cardiac complaints getting admitted and having expensive evaluations.
The new thing will be CT angiograms of coronaries, done in the ER. They seem to have good negative predictive value. Maybe it's a good thing... if nothing else, they may prevent many, many thousands of expensive unnecessary admissions.
That 7K charge that you mentioned would be only for the ER. Admission would be charged separately. The pricing is obscene. That's what happens with government price controls -- there is always an opening which (by mistake or intentionally) was left unregulated, and that's were the pricing will go nuts. |
