The
system is also simply irrational at times. Consider Drew Calver, a
forty-four-year-old high-school history teacher and swim coach. A fit swimmer
who had completed an Ironman triathlon five months earlier, he had just taken
out the garbage when he collapsed from a heart attack. A neighbor rushed him to
the emergency room of a nearby hospital, St. David's Medical Center in Austin,
Texas. Doctors there inserted stents in his clogged coronary artery during a
four-day stay. Calver asked the hospital if insurance would cover the
procedures and he was told not to worry, that the hospital would take his
insurance. The hospital did indeed take an insurance payment of $55,840, but it
also charged him an additional $108,951.
?
"They're
going to give me another heart attack stressing over this bill," Calver
told Kaiser Health News. "1 can't pay this bill on my teacher salary, and I
don't want this to go to a debt collector."
?
St.
David's did indeed send the bill to a debt collector, who sent Calver a letter
demanding immediate payment. Meanwhile, experts said the billing was hugely
inflated. For example, St. David's charged $19,700 for a stent that costs
hospitals about $1,150. After Kaiser Health News published a story reporting
that, St. David's abruptly suspended debt collection efforts and agreed to
reduce its fee from $108,951 to $332.
?
Such
a farce could not have occurred in other countries. One study published in The
American Journal of Medicine found that 42 percent of Americans diagnosed with
cancer between 1998 and 2014 drained all their life assets over the next two
years. That, too, doesn't happen in other countries. The bottom line is that
since 1970 we have seen American exceptionalism in health care in multiple
ways: we lack universal care. we spend more on health and we get worse results.
?
Nicholas Kristoff "Tightrope:
Americans Reaching for Hope" (2020)
?
