medical bills June 22, 2007
I have good medical insurance. Still, I am staggered by the amount of money I pay out in medical bills for my relatively healthy family.
In the past nine months, I had a miscarriage, which required an outpatient surgery. I saw a high risk obstetrician for the first six months of my pregnancy. I am now seeing a midwife at a birth center. All of those things are ostensibly completely covered by my health insurance. But still, the little “extra” bills - copays and uncovered lab costs and this and that and this again — really add up.
It seems like every single day I get another bill for $50 or $7.87 or $280 for some individual bit of medical care that falls outside the purview of my health coverage. We get so many of these individual bills in the past few months that it’s literally hard to keep up with them.
Jon has had some stomach problems lately, and I know the bills for the care he’s received will soon start rolling in as well.
And while my care and birth costs at the birth center are about half what an uncomplicated birth with doctors would cost at the hospital, I still had a co-pay of $700 that had to be paid out of pocket to the birth center before my 36th week of pregnancy.
Every time I pay one of these bills, I remember how lucky I am to have health insurance, and I think about how complicated and overwhelming it must be for families with major medical problems — even those with “good” health insurance - to keep up with and pay all the uninsured costs that seem to come with any medical care.
I am looking forward to seeing Michael Moore’s movie, “Sicko.”
Three weeks ago, my dad’s wife had hip replacement surgery (she’s 51) to correct a birth defect. They have great insurance but still received a bill for $41,000 last week. I don’t know how much of that will be out of pocket and how much reimbursed.
I too can’t wait to see Sicko.
While I know no system is perfect, being in a universal health care system is very reassuring.
I love the idea of universal health care, but mostly I love the idea of getting to go to the doctor when I or my family need to. That’s one of the biggest evils of our current health care system, and I know plenty of people just like me. We very seldom have to worry about copays or uncovered expenditures because we so seldom visit a doctor.
What good is it to have “the world’s greatest health care” when few truly have access to it?
Not to brag or anything, but man, I could show you some medical bills….
I, too, am looking forward to this movie. We also have a relatively healthy family, but the past few years have had minor outpatient surgery, simple vaginal childbirth with only a 24-hour hospital stay, and a year ago my daughter spent 4 nights inpatient with rotavirus… our medical bills with deductibles and various things that don’t even go toward deductible have averaged $5,000 per year the past few years. This is not counting the $10,000 in insurance premiums paid by ourselves and our employers. It is a real dilemma.
My medication for my bipolar disorder runs somewhere along the $250 per month range. Recently, due to a relapse, we changed up some of my meds and dropped one along the way. The very first thing that I thought of wasn’t, “oh, I am happy that I will be feeling better by dropping this med,” but rather, “Oh, that will be a break for the old bank book.”
My husband just had an MRI and even with our so-called “excellent” coverage, it will run us about $1600 out of pocket.
I had to fight with my insurance company to cover the costs of my tubal ligation. They will subsidize a couple of rounds of IVF every few years, but would not tie my tubes. I won, but it was galling that there was a fight in the first place.
[...] to emotions, and they’re emotions I agree with and can definitely relate to. A while back, Katie posted on her blog about the mounting medical bills we have because we’re having a baby. We have [...]