Emergency Room Bank Buster vs Doctors Office

 Have to have hernia surgery; only have Medicare.

My choices are go to emergency room and take pot luck on the surgeon at a
hospital not exactly known for it's excellence OR go to doctors office and
probably have them ask me for a deposit before they will do anything. My guess
is emergency room will result in big overcharges that they will want me to  pay
only I am judgement proof-they cannot get blood from a turnip, OR go to private
surgeon; my guess is he will say, you need to deposit XX dollars before I will
do it. Anyone here been in a similar situation that can offer helpful advice or
information? Thanks much!

  Anonymous wrote:

hospital not exactly known for it's excellence OR go to doctors office and
probably have them ask me for a deposit before they will do anything. My guess
is emergency room will result in big overcharges that they will want me to  pay
only I am judgement proof-they cannot get blood from a turnip, OR go to private
surgeon; my guess is he will say, you need to deposit XX dollars before I will
do it. Anyone here been in a similar situation that can offer helpful advice or
information? Thanks much!

Emergency rooms are for emergencies. If you're not having bowel
incarceration (and you'd probably know this and it would be an
emergency!) you don't belong in an emergency room for this.
Since you know about it in advance you have time to find a doctor who
accepts Medicare and can arrange to find one that uses the hospital you
prefer.

 Yes, I did. That WAS after discount. :-(

The one bill I AM going to fight when they finally send it is the original
E.R. visit in Oct. when they diagnosed Gallstones. I was looped on
painkillers when they sent me for testing and didn't bother to ask
questions. They gave me a CT scan to detect gall bladder trouble when,
according to my DR.....they could have and should have determined the
problem with a simple ultrsound. My DR. was irate. I'll pay a few thousand
for something that should have been a few hundred.
But they won't see it. I'm going to see if I can get them to settle for
2,000.00

Denise

 stillwagon@windstream.net says...

They also supplied you with a sterile operating room and surgical
instruments.  All of which must be re-sterilized or replaced after your
procedure, requiring yet more staff (to perform the cleaning and
sterilization) and equipment, such as a steam autoclave to sterilize the
scalpel the surgeon used.  

Your surgeon likely performed laproscopic surgery to remove your
gallbladder, resulting in you having three tiny incisions rather than a
gut-splitting gash across your abdomen.  That little trick only took
about a decade of research to figure out, and a year of training for the
surgeon, plus a laparoscope that runs about $10,000.  And needs to be
sterilized, repaired, and replaced occasionally.

Now, you could have had all this done on your kitchen table, with
whatever was handy, with a little dish soap or iodine to keep things
clean, and it's possible you might not even die from the secondary
infections, assuming you survived the operation.

--Gene

 
Yes, you were still very sick because, unfortunately, the medical profession
knows nothing about healthy nutrition. If you had cut out all carbs instead
of all fats, you would have lost even more weight and your gallbladder would
have been fine. Doctors don't cure disease, they just treat symptoms.