$2000 For An Emergency Room Visit ???
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Back in January my son had an absess on his leg, it burst after a few days and I got worried so I took him to the emergency room. We waited for over an hour and were seen by a doctor who looked at it, swabbed it with some kind of stuff (not sure what it was) put a bandage on it and he told us to come back in a few days for a check up, he told me that I wouldn't be charged for the follow up. We went back 3 days later, he looked at the absess said it was doing great took the bandage off it and told me to allow it breath and everything should be fine, that visit lasted less than an hour.
In February I got a bill for $354 from the physician. Yesterday I received TWO bills one for $900.00 for the first visit and one for $720 for the second, both of those were directly from the hospital. Thats a whopping total of $1974.00 for a doctor to basically LOOK at and put a bandage on an absess. Are you kidding me? I don't have insurance for him at the moment because it's too expensive, but hey I can afford a $1974.00 bill? I could have taken him to a top notch Park Avenue doctor for that. What the heck is going on with these hospitals? Are they really serious? The two bills from the hospital were NOT itemized and claimed that they were past due, this was the first I'd seen them. I figured that these bills were a mistake so I called them and they told me they were in fact legitimate bills and that they would send me out the itemized bill (which they claimed they had already done). Is it possible that this is some kind of scam from the hospital? How can something like this cost almost $2000.00? I'm LIVID right now.
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That's completely outrageous, the medical care in this country needs a serious overhaul, oh well they'll be whistling dixie for a long time, cos they are never gonna see a penny of that.
oh well they'll be whistling dixie for a long time, cos they are never gonna see a penny of that.
Then what they do is pass it off to collections agencies, who bombard your phone multiple times a day, with persistant, aggressive, rude collectors, daily, for months on end, using many different phone numbers so that blocking them all becomes actual work.
And if they still can't get a hold of you, or get the money, they file a report, which goes against your credit rating. Been there, done that. 
That's ok, I never answer a call if I don't know who the caller is. Any toll free number gets blocked automatically on my phone anyway. They can call all they want, it's physically impossible for me to pay that amount of money not to mention how ridiculous the cost of a band aid is, because thats all they put on him. Seriously, even if I'd had insurance, it would have been a $50 copay and they probably would have ended up collecting a minute fraction of those bills from the insurance company anyway, so there is something seriously seriously wrong with the healthcare system.
Edit: And why can't they inform you when you walk in that your bill is going to be somewhere upwards of at least a grand and give you the option of staying or leaving? Disgraceful!!!!!
That's ok, I never answer a call if I don't know who the caller is. Any toll free number gets blocked automatically on my phone anyway. They can call all they want, it's physically impossible for me to pay that amount of money
It's still unbelievably annoying to keep hearing that phone ringing a hundred times a day. For that I recommend a combination of Call Screening from your phone company (I have Comcast) but they only allow I think it's up to 12 phone numbers, and a program called Phonetray Free. Hook your phone line up through your computer and keep this running, and you can have it 'zap' any phone number you want.
Well I can add any phone number I want to my block list on my cell, what happens is when the particular blocked number calls, my phone doesn't ring, it will just go into my voice mail, and I hardly ever check that. I just look at my missed calls and return the ones that are familiar to me, then I go thru my voice mail maybe once a week to delete the garbage 
Thanks for the info though, very helpful!
Cool. I have a cell and a landline, so there's multiple avenues for collectors to try and get at me, 
. I never have to use any blocking on my cell though since the number (so far) hasn't laned in anyones hands that I don't know or want calling me, and telemarketers haven't found it yet I guess.
My landline is a whole different story though. Call Screening works the same way; any number added to the list, your phone won't even ring, and it doesn't even send them to voicemail. They get dowright DEEENIED. 
But 12 numbers is far from enough, so I have to use a combo of the 2 I mentioned.
And that my friend is why we need to get rid of illegal immigrants. If you do everything by the book, you end up struggling to pay medical bills or with damaged credit, or both, but since illegal immigrants don't have any legal trails to go after, what can be done to them?? Attack their credit rating?? What do they care?? Keep calling them to try and get the money out of them? They probably don't even have a phone! There's NOTHING they can do to them to get the money out of them, and they KNOW it, so where does it land? In (yours) the tax payers laps, after all SOMEONE has to still pay those fee's, right?
Anyone who is against getting rid of the illegals needs theri heads examined. Especially if it's just because we don't want to hurt their poor little feelings by stopping them and asking to see identification. Too much tree hugging.
Ha! I was just thinking the exact same thing.. maybe I should have walked in and given a ficticious name, and told them that I have no ID, that way I would have been without a trace. Isn't that what they do? oh no wait, they don't have to, they don't even exist on paper in this country. I pay taxes and live by the book but I still can't afford medical insurance for my kid, but now I'm getting landed with this outrageous bill. I bet 3/4 of those costs are to pay for that exact thing. It's amazing, sometimes it just doesn't pay to be honest, which is really quite sad.
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Oh no, that's no mistake, that's modus operandi for emergency room visits. I've been to them on more than one occasion, all turned out to be absolutely nothing (except when I went with a broken arm) and ALL cost in the thousands. Once I went because I literally felt like i had to be dying or something, with how bad I felt; I was there for 4 hours, mostly just laying in the bed completely by myself. I may have had a grand total of about 20 minutes of Dr./Nurse time. Had the standard blood pressure test, pee'd in a cup, an IV full of nothing but the water solution in me. Turned out I was simply extremely dehydrated and overtrained. They told me to go buy some Gatorade, put a band-aid over the IV hole, make an appointment with a real Dr. if I still kept feeling bad, and it cost me over 4G's.
I've learned a hard lesson when it comes to being ill, in any form ... never EVER go to the emergency room, unless you're 100% positive that you're about to DIE. Anything else ... wait until you can see a Dr. in his office. Even if you have to wait until Monday when they 'can' see you.
I don't think it's even possible to have an ER visit costing under about $1500. It seems like a base price, and only goes up from there.
Add an ambulance as a chauffer, and forgedda-boudit ...