Yesterday I received an Explanation of Benefits (EOB) from my health insurance carrier. The good news: aside from the co-pay to my primary care physician, which I had already paid, I owed nothing for the routine blood tests I had taken in March. The bad news: the fee the hospital lab had charged the insurance company.
Over $360.
For a lab test.
Several days before that, I was picking up a family member from the hospital when I saw her cardiologist in the hallway. He had no clue that his patient had been admitted two days earlier--and, from what I could tell, little interest, although a week ago in his office he'd been avuncular and chatty.
The chattiness was gone.
"You'll have to talk to her hospital doctor," he told me and walked off.
Well, I thought. So much for medical care.
Then my housekeeper told me about her sixty-something-year-old mother, who lives in Guatemala. The mother, who has a heart condition, had been in urgent need of seeing her cardiologist. The physician lived in the country's capital. And because of civil unrest, all roads to the capital had been sealed off. She had to settle for another doctor who lived closer but wasn't a specialist.
That story doesn't make me happy about the excessive lab fees, which are a sympton of a greater problem, or the state of medical care in this country.
But it does color my perspective...
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