I feel like I should make a post about this because it’s not something that’s very well-known, and that Americans in particular may need to know about given the uncertain state of our healthcare system at the moment. I’ve wanted to write this out for a while, It’s kind of a long post, so sorry about that!
If you have an emergency and have to go to the hospital, you’ll owe the hospital a lot of money. (I got into a car wreck and broke my ankle and my arm. My hospital bill was around $20,000)
You’ll also owe the ambulance provider, if you need one. (My ambulance bill was about $800)
You may get separate bills from the anesthesiologist or surgeon. (My anesthesiologist bill was $1,700)
You may need follow-up appointments. (My orthopedic surgeon billed me for the appointments and his surgery together and it was about $1,000)
You’ve also got to pay for medical equipment you need afterward, like crutches or a walking boot. (Mine cost about $75)
Altogether, I ended up with almost $24,000 in medical debt from one car accident. That’s a really scary number for someone like me who makes $10/hr at a 12 hour a week job.
I got my debt down to $1075 by making some phone calls and submitting some paperwork.
The first thing I did was contact the hospital. They don’t make it easy to find, but many hospitals (perhaps most hospitals?) have financial assistance programs for people who can’t afford medical bills. I don’t make a lot of money, and I have bills to pay, so they were able to help me. I called the billing department and asked if they had any assistance programs for low income people who can’t pay their bills. I had to call multiple times, and I got transferred in circles by people who didn’t know what I was talking about. Finally, I got an appointment with someone in “Eligibility Services” (I don’t know what other hospitals call it, if it’s something different). I had to bring my pay stubs and copies of all of my bills. When I got to the hospital for the appointment, nobody knew what I was talking about so I had to wander a little to find where I needed to go. I spoke with the guy in Eligibility Services, and I waited for a decision on how much of the bill they would forgive. A month later, I got a call telling me it was totally forgiven.
I did the same thing for my ambulance bill and my anesthesiologist, but the process was a LOT easier. I just had to mail some paperwork and it was totally forgiven.
I didn’t bother with the medical equipment suppliers, since the bills came from separate companies and I didn’t feel like going through the process twice for $75. I was assured at the hospital that they had similar programs for debt forgiveness, so I could have probably avoided paying that too.
The only thing I couldn’t get taken care of was the surgeon/follow-up appointment cost, but they were able to put me on a no-interest payment plan.
Medical debt is scary because it’s something that can come from stuff that’s already really scary. I didn’t need the burden of $24,000 in debt on top of trying to get around on a crutch with a broken arm (it’s not easy, believe me!).. but I can’t imagine what it would be like with a bigger debt or a more severe medical emergency. I see lots of people in even worse trouble than I was in, both financially and medically. Please know that there are options for you when that GoFundMe doesn’t do enough. Even if your income is higher than mine, it’s worth a shot even for partial debt forgiveness.
I am about 900% sure there are people who don`the know this.
PLEASE READ THIS IF YOU LIVE IN AMERICA AND HAVE MEDICAL BILLS
I had to do this once as well and I can ABSOLUTELY confirm that this is true.
Get in contact with the hospital. Don’t just…sit there and let the anxiety grow and panic and then ignore it in an effort to find peace.
Why don’t you Google average wait times to receive a medical procedure. There are Canadians that come to the U.S. to get medical care rather than wait over a month to get it done in Canada.
I had cancer and im canadian dumbass i know full well what the wait times are like and its only long if its shit that can wait. Im sorry but im ok with waiting with a non life threatening injury if no one gets turned away from healthcare because they’re poor. The only canadians that go to the united states are rich enough that they are willing to spend the money to save a few hours waiting
Except people with life threatening injuries have to wait as well. My father had to go to the ER because the screws in his knee busted making his stitches rip open and my parents waited for hours before finally leaving when they noticed an elderly woman with a head injury and broken leg waiting at least four hours BEFORE my parents arrived.
Brian Sinclair’s death was completely preventable, yet he waited 34 HOURS in the ER for treatment that would have taken 30 minutes to an hour at most.
There are pros and cons to Canada’s healthcare, and if people want to spend extra money for arguably better treatment and shorter wait lines, I’m personally going to support them any way I can.
Yeah, that happens in the US too though. Literally every single day. Go into any ER in the country at like 9:30 pm and you will see dozens of people with painful injuries waiting hours to see a doctor. People die in the US waiting to see a doctor. The only difference is that it costs them hundreds of thousands of dollars to do so.
I had to wait six months to see an endocrinologist in the US and when I wanted to switch doctors I had to wait another six months to see somebody else, who are these people in the US who don’t have wait times?
(Brian Sinclair’s death, by the way? It’s a terrible tragedy… but the problem there was not that health care resources are spread too thin. It was racism. They saw a native man and assumed he was homeless and drunk, not in distress. As the study I cited above shows, racism is also a factor in US health care.)
So basically, you’re paying a lot more, at both the end-user and governmental levels… but you’re not actually getting a lot more.
Finally: You know what else Canada has that the US doesn’t? Wait time guarantees that require offering a faster alternative if they’re blown.
All those stories of Canadians coming to the US? Yeah, they’re basically made up. Even the highly shady right-wing think tank that Fuckface von Clownstick got the story from, trying to make the best possible case for privatization, only found that 1% of Canadian patients received health care abroad. One. percent. And that’s not “went to the US for health care,” that’s “received health care literally anywhere else for any reason, including just happening to be in another country when we got sick or injured.”
The actual numbers? Well, this study is old, but… out of a pool of 18 000 respondents, they found twenty who went to the US specifically for care.
Twenty. 0.11%.
They found that this data was consistent with Canadian payment records and US border region hospital data, so… yeah. It basically doesn’t happen. And when it does? Frequently that’s because there is an issue with the normal procedures in Canada… so the provincial government covers the cost of getting the patient to the US and treating them there.
I’ll take that over “you must be this rich to live” any day of the week.
It was also found Canadians who are treated in the States are far morely to be there because they became sick or injured while on vacation or are snow birds rather than they purposefully crossed the border.
‘Cause let me tell ya, as someone with a few chronic issues, if my choice is a 20 minute trip to the local hospital in bad traffic, where I’ll at least get coping treatment while I wait or an hour trip, plus border wait, to the States? Yeah, I’ll go local every time. The whole not having to shell out money thing is nice.
I also live near the second busiest hospital in BC. (Possibly Western Canada) Longest I have EVER waited is two hours.. and that was for a shot of toradol for pain treatment.
Another thing the liars above leave out is the huge number of working people in the US who just… don’t go to the doctor when they get injured. Because they know they can’t afford either the cost or the time away from work to get treatment and let it do its work. The US is filled with manual laborers -from roofers to bartenders to painters to stockers- with chronic pain conditions, un- or poorly healed injuries. How do they live with it? Every advil/tylenol/aspirin commericial tells you how. The importance of pain-meds to Pharma profits and easy availability of blackmarket opiates suggests an alternate answer.
The US is 300million people largely self-medicating their pain-management because they don’t want to lose their jobs, can’t afford to see a doctor for it, and don’t trust doctors because of previous bad past experiences caused by the private healthcare system. These people are, effectively, stuck in life-long wait-times, yet conservative defenders of our broken system always seem to forget to mention them when the subject of public healthcare arises.
I have a friend who right now is waiting for a surgery to fix her very badly torn ACL. You know, the ligament that makes it so you can walk, which is kind of important for basically all kinds of work. She is in constant pain, and she already has depression problems so it’s really a precarious situation for her to be in mental-health-wise. She can’t work, so she’s losing money sitting at home unable to do anything. They won’t give her a wheelchair, and she had to pay for her crutches so she can hobble around her house. She can’t drive with her leg jacked up, so she’s homebound. They’re making her wait til the end of March to get it fixed. (It happened late December.)
Oh yeah, and she’s in the US. She’s being told to wait because she’s on a bad insurance plan (the only one she could afford) that won’t let her go to a further away specialist, and the only one in her area is booked up through March. She can’t afford to pay out-of-pocket for the specialists further away and since her insurance won’t let her go there, she’s stuck waiting. Tell me again how great American health systems are and how we don’t have wait times because of it?
On top of this, can anyone explain to me how a shortage of available personnel is the fault of the insurance system and not the physical limitations of population size in proportion to currently standing/staffed hospitals and doctors? I’m trying to wrap my head around “more people getting seen” being a bad thing, is the US system’s solution to this “poor people just do not get care so there are fewer people in line”? Wouldn’t the solution to the problem be “encourage more people to become doctors and nurses, subsidize education and build more emergency care centers”? I’m??
So like can we stop pretending that just because Canada hasn’t absolutely perfected it’s healthcare yet that it somehow isn’t still a far better way of doing things?
When I had my consult with the neurosurgeon for my decompressive craniectomy, it was in early March. Since it was not a life-threatening situation and the doctor was also the chief surgeon and the head of oncology in a neurological hospital, I was told I’d likely have to wait a bit, and was given an estimate of “Early June”. So, three months. Not terrible for a non-urgent procedure by an incredibly busy, incredibly qualified doctor.
I got a phone call in the beginning of April telling me that some space had opened up and my surgery would now be April 19th. I literally did not have time to train a replacement at work, get a will done up, etc.
So yeah, the wait times here in Quebec can be pretty irritating for non-urgent things, but when it’s stuff that really needs to get done, *it gets done*. And often even sooner than estimated.
My surgery ended up costing a whopping $240, because I requested a private room and WiFi access. Had I been willing to sleep in a ward and just use the internet on my phone, it would have been free. Same procedure in a similar facility in Colorado that specialises in neuro procedures? Estimated $140,000. And a six-month waitlist.
OK, time for the US to wake up and realise all they think they know about healthcare in other countries is pretty much just lies and propaganda to make them accept their broken system.
Lets see if I’m following here.
Wait times happen because the health system has a supply/demand mis-match, thus priority has to be given to some patients over others. Wait times based on medical need mean that people with less severe issues will wait longer.
This is unfair, says the person against socialized health care, because who has to wait for service shouldn’t depend on the severity of their issue, but instead, their capability of paying for the access.
So we have, in essence, two proposed solutions to there being a shortage of health care, one is that the people with the greatest need would get priority, and the other is those with the greatest wealth will get priority.
This is the fundamental flaw with treating issues of public good as commodities.
The millionaire with the cold gets the room, doesn’t matter if someone else has a broken arm.
In the USA, it’s 100x cheaper to take an Uber to the hospital instead of an ambulance.
I don’t know if this is true or.. Like, having to pay for an ambulance that is taking you to the hospital? That doesn’t make any sense. What kind of distopian world is that?
It costs thousands of dollars to ride in an ambulance
In America some people with chronic health conditions like epilepsy literally have to wear medical IDs that say “don’t call an ambulance/911”. Some well-meaning person calling an ambulance for you will turn into a thousand (or couple thousand) dollars that YOU are on the hook for, even though you didn’t make the call. So, PSA: if you see someone having a seizure, look for a medical ID! You should only call an ambulance if: the person is elderly, pregnant, or the seizure lasts more than 4 minutes. Otherwise, wait for the seizure to pass, then ask the person if they want an ambulance when they regain consciousness.
wtf
Oh my god what.
Here in Quebec, if you call an ambulance for something they deem non-emergency, you get a bill later for like $180. But if it’s anything like a loss of consciousness, chest pains, labour, whatever, or if you’re in a public place and a a well-meaning samaritan calls 911, it’s paid for by the government.
Seriously, everything about healthcare in the US makes me want to cry.
Imagine a world where you have to wear tags to tell people trying to help you that “It’s ok, don’t try to help, I can’t afford to pay if someone tries to save my life. I’ll just take my chances and hope it’s not life-threatening.”
Literally the point of this post is that Americans do not have to imagine that world. We live in it
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