How much does it cost not to die in America

Every year at the same time, I began to feel as if I had the flu. I was losing money on orders that I could not pass, because my eyes were overshadowed and my thoughts were confused. I was removed from the schedule in a cafe where I worked. In order not to die from an allergy attack, I was ready to give away a fortune.

И Molly Osberg, the author of this blog gave away. Like all Americans who have learned from experience what a disease is when you have no insurance.

Фото: Depositphotos

I go crazy with anxiety, while hovering to the clinic, all in sweat. I pay $ 60 for cough syrup, $ 300 for an 10 minute consultation (this is if I even have that kind of money; this is about a week's earnings on pouring coffee).

But suppose I still managed to get to the hospital

My friend is delivering me because the 15 minute ambulance ride costs almost $ 2 000, which I don’t have. I have financial problems and I’ve already delayed payments Obamacare. In the car, my friend realizes that I no longer think, because the authorities are beginning to refuse. My body temperature has already passed for 38C.

When doctors cannot understand what is happening to me, they check my creditworthiness before starting a more serious treatment.

My credit history is terrible. For several years now I have been listed as a huge unpaid bill for an international call from my stolen phone. Probably because of this, they transfer me to a state hospital, where there are no more than twenty specialists for carrying out an “unusual” operation.

Doctors are obliged to stabilize the patient, but they are not obliged, say, to stabilize him so long that it is possible to have time to transport him to another hospital with a full-fledged infectious department. Therefore, this is how I will die before they determine what is wrong with me, because I am not the patient who can financially afford a complicated procedure for saving lives.

But even if I can convince the hospital to ignore my lack of money, in one of these alternative time scenarios, I don’t have a parent with language skills and a time and financial resource that could come to New York to negotiate with doctors who need a legal representative for analysis of several complex choices. I can't do it, I'm already in a medical coma.

I have only been in the hospital for two days, but I already have bills for anesthesia, the involvement of six specialists, X-rays and antibiotics - almost $ 30 000. If I don’t have a treatment that costs an extra $ 12 705 in a few hours as a surgeon, I will die.

But imagine that I was lucky

My mom is in time for New York on time. She demands that the doctors do everything in their power to save me, and agrees to pay for the operation with her credit funds. She convinces the stationery rats that she can pay the bills. After all, I am her only child.

I get into intensive care on 10 days; it can cost from $ 10 000 per day, and this is not taking into account the breathing apparatus, sensors and droppers stuck to me right in the neck.

At the time of discharge from the hospital, we are given a total bill for $ 642 650,76. If this happens a few years earlier, a respected medical center, where I spent almost a month, categorically refuses requests for financial assistance and sends bills for an urgent operation to the collection service, which seizes homes of patients and demands to deprive them of their property rights for debts . Most likely, I am not aware of what is happening until I return to my apartment, where I undergo treatment with antibiotic drips three times a day, which a special nurse comes to stab. Her services are expensive.

In this version of the story I survived, but did not receive money for most of the summer. When I run out of oxycodone, I begin to wake up in tears, completely paralyzed by pain; medical bills are already pounding on my porch. I “float”, spend stretching meaningless days in bed and try to remember what kind of person I was before I got into all this mess; I need help to get my broken body out of bed. I can not lift anything, I can not cook myself a meal or go more than a quarter. Perhaps some more time I will lie in a rehabilitation center, since I do not have anyone who could help so that I did not leave.

Needless to say about physical or financial recovery in any of these scenarios: I can not imagine how you can survive emotionally, if all the time you get calls from collectors, waiting for you to be evicted from home, waiting for the anesthetic to work, so that I I could continue to look for work, still with a dropper in my hand.

I am 29, I haven’t had a single serious illness before, I am unemployed, exhausted, and I live in constant pain.

Of course, all this did not happen to me. I’m not one of the 28 millions of Americans who don’t have insurance at all, and not one of the 45 000 people who die every year due to lack of insurance.

I am not one of the 75% of US citizens who do not have the opportunity to take paid sick leave, and I do not live in one of the 45 states where there are no plans for short-term disability. I am not one of 30% insured patients who are taken aback by fantastic bills for visiting a hospital.

That is why I did not become one of the millions who fail to pay their medical debts every year, which is why medical bills regularly become the main cause of bankruptcies in this country.

“I can’t imagine how you can survive emotionally if you’re constantly getting calls from debt collectors.” Photo kinja.com/mollyosberg

But still this story is a little about me

The weekend I still felt weird, so at the beginning of the week I went to the hospital for cough syrup. I quickly discovered that I could not drink it. Two days later, in sweat and delirium, I would stumble back to the clinic. I tried to brush my teeth, but vomiting began. The doctor did not even examine me: “You will only leave here by ambulance,” she said, going to call the hospital. I protested, confident that it would be too expensive. I dialed a friend, he called the car, and we drove to the nearest emergency hospital.

The number of doctors who provide emergency medical care, especially when the cause of the disease is unknown, can be terrified. It often happens that if a person no longer understands what is happening, they call on an army of expensive specialists. The most expensive of them - those that patients themselves are unlikely to choose: pathologists, anesthesiologists and emergency doctors.

I met them all when I was admitted to the Brooklyn hospital, although I remembered only a part of the people who tried to understand what caused my body to fall into a septic shock. My medical record says that during the 40 hours I was examined by six specialists. There was an anesthesiologist who calmed my horror when I was put on bronchoscopy (I was afraid I would wake up with a camera in the larynx), infectiologists who asked me about my sex life, how often I was “high” when I had the last menstruation and whether I was somewhere near the cattle.

“My medical records at the Brooklyn hospital show that I was seen by six specialists in 40 hours.” Photo kinja.com/mollyosberg

For a while they thought I had toxic shock. They searched for a tampon inside of me, but they did not find it. A seal was found near the lung, but it was not cancer, although one doctor thought so. I was isolated. I wrote to a friend with desperate joy: "They treat me like a patient of World War Z." The joke quickly lost its taste when I started to scroll through the pictures from this movie. I added: "Just do not panic, I do not die, ahah."

It was very hard for me to breathe. My arms and legs turned bright red. An incomprehensible infection circulating through my blood was very similar to the one that venous addicts suffer from. I had to tell the stone-faced doctor about all the drugs I took, how often and when was the last time. I distinctly felt that he thought I was lying. He asked me about my mental health, and it seemed strange to me.

But when I was finally placed in a small private chamber, I did not understand if I could believe myself. The green carpet and walls in the ward looked bad, strange and monochrome: I thought, maybe I'm going crazy, maybe I really took drugs. I suddenly felt scared to be alone.

A week ago, I was a healthy man at the age of 20 + and drank in a new apartment of my friend in Fort Green. And now the doctors tried to explain to me the results of the tests, but I did not understand what I was talking about.

The hospital in which I was lying, of course, refused to comment on what options patients have if they cannot immediately deposit cash. My surgeon, dear man, who was delighted with my recovery - and before the operation I took a photo of a hole in my lung, about the size of a ping-pong ball - recently told me that the operation was “unusual” and the problem was “high risk. Of course, he does not deal with insurance issues, for which there are stationery rats. "But I know," he wrote to me in a letter, "that insurance can limit and complicate our lives, because because of it, patients often do not get access to the medicine they deserve."

Sherry Gleed, dean of the Department of Civil Service at the University of New York, spoke even more clearly: even at the most accessible level Obamacare I would pay the maximum amount out of my pocket (a little over $ 6 000) and get access only to network doctors.

They were carnivorous bacteria, which are now talking so much!

When checking dying tissue removed from my chest cavity, they discovered that I had contracted a relatively rare form of streptococcus - a septic shock affecting my organs was caused by predatory bacteria that were incubated in my lung before piercing a hole in it. Some journalists call this form of streptococcus a “carnivorous disease,” which feeds on fatty tissue just under the skin. In my case, he made his way into the organ and started killing everything around. The adult mortality rate from such infections is 40 – 70%. Many lose limbs or parts of the face. Others need breathing apparatus or dialysis until the end of their lives.

To exacerbate the apparent sense of unreality of what is happening, I recently read the CDC study, which says that for some reason, patients who become infected with these types of severe streptococcal infections are much more likely to survive during the summer months.

When I came out of a medical coma a few days later — about 10 days after I fell ill — I could not understand why everyone was sobbing. Gradually, I discovered the tubes in my nose, torso and bladder - mainly due to the fact that the medical staff came to empty them or fix them. A whole bunch of droppers protruded from the neck. But my friends already knew everything about these cars, joked about them (I did not understand these jokes) and fell in love with the nurse.

I survived because I had insurance

Many documents have already been issued instead of me: checks came to my house with payment, the doctors' conclusions were sent to the insurance and to the staff. The staff sent a very nice postcard. I could not believe my eyes that there was the signature of our CEO. It is not surprising that mainly white-collar workers are paid mainly for lying in the hospital. The New York State Short-term Disability Program covered half of my salary, the rest was paid by my employer.

It is worth mentioning that, despite the fact that the people in the hospital were very gentle and caring, and the insurance covered almost everything, these two institutions ruined the lives of many people.

The center, where I lay for almost a month, several years ago was the object of investigation regarding the receipt of money from charity and the refusal to provide financial assistance to low-income patients. My insurance also sued many claimants: for example, last November, they refused to pay for breast cancer treatments for $ 400 000.

For reasons that I never understand, secret contacts between doctors, administrators and insurance left I have to pay $ 2 654,42 of the total bill - $ 648 221,53.

The checks that came to me at that time, of course, helped me cover mandatory payments and cash expenses. And also with further long recovery.

“It is worth mentioning that even though the people at the hospital were very gentle and caring, and insurance covered almost everything, these two institutions ruined the lives of many people.” Photo kinja.com/mollyosberg

A surgical installation of an intravenous catheter that passes from the shoulder to the heart and pumps antibiotics into the blood would cost $ 1 300 to $ 3 000 without insurance. Twice a week a nurse came to me to check for signs of infection and change me. She said that she is in a reggae group and is a “healer”. She favored the crystals that my more superstitious friends left me. The company she works for has billed my insurance bill for almost $ 7 000 for her services.

I was lucky not because I survived this infection, but because I belong to a narrow class of Americans who have the right insurance for their situation and can survive a trauma of this magnitude, and for whom getting into the medical system is actually an advantage.

When people tell me that I “survived”, and they say that to me often, they are right. It is already a foregone conclusion who in this country has the opportunity to survive, especially now, when it is again fashionable to say that medicine is not a right. This is a sentence for those who have no such opportunity.

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