If getting over the pain of having an appendix removed in October wasn't enough, the huge unexpected hospital bill certainly did the trick for a 20-year-old California man.
Sutter General Hospital in Sacramento, Ca. sent a bill for $55,029.31 for a 24-hour stay. It was reduced to $11,119.23 because of his insurance, ABC News reported.
Shocked, the patient took out his frustration by posting the bill on Reddit.
"I never truly understood how much health care in the U.S. costs until I got appendicitis in October," he wrote on the social media site. "I'm a 20-year-old guy. Thought other people should see this to get a real idea of how much an unpreventable illness costs in the U.S."
Having spent only two hours in the recovery room, the man was surprised that the room alone cost $7,501.00. The surgery cost $16,277, according to ABC News.
"I think you can see how outrageous some of these costs are," he wrote.
Given recent studies that showed how the cost of medical procedures could vary from hospital to hospital, the bill should not be so surprising, said Timothy McBride, a professor and health policy analyst at Washington University in St. Louis.
The cost of an appendectomy was the topic of research done by the University of California San Francisco researchers in April among 19,000 patients in California. An appendectomy varied in price from $1,529 to $182,955, according to researchers whose study was published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.
"For some reasons that are probably quite legitimate, they pad these prices to cover what economists might call fixed costs," McBride said.
Uncompensated care and staff costs are some items to be included, he said. Hospital prices can therefore vary depending on whether the hospital is a teaching hospital, sees more patients with chronic disease or offers only basic care, ABC News reported.
Questions about the medical bills and price reduction shouldn't be held back by patients, McBride said.
"It's kind of like an opening bid if you went into an auto store," McBride said of hospital billing. "Very few people now pay the sticker price."
Complicated hospital billing can be navigated through the help of people at the hospital, said Sutter General Hospital spokeswoman Nancy Turner. She said hospitals often serve many patients who don't pay at all or don't pay the actual cost of treatment because they are on Medicare or Medi-Cal, California's version of Medicaid.
"Sutter Health agrees that an improved billing structure is needed, where published charges are more closely aligned with actual costs," Turner said. "And a more straightforward pricing system is only possible when reimbursement from government-sponsored patients covers actual costs."
