The Healthcare Shakedown

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My wife had some procedures done recently. She's fine now. Recovering. That's the good news. The bad news came in the mail.

Insurance covered a great deal. We're grateful for that. But it still leaves a substantial amount uncovered. We're talking thousands of dollars. There have been some charges that made our jaws drop. The most jaw dropping? A less than 30 minute outpatient procedure that cost more than a full day in the hospital. Let that sink in. In and out in under half an hour. Billed like she had a week long stay in the ICU.

How does that math work? It doesn't. But they send the bill anyway.

Then there's the usual dance between billing and insurance. Something got coded wrong on one of her procedures. Of course it did. Something always gets coded wrong. She handled the issue. Spent hours on the phone. Got transferred. Put on hold. Transferred again. Explained the same thing to three different people. Finally got it sorted. Or so we hope.

This is the system. This is what we deal with. But at least we have insurance.

Here's what gets me. We did everything right. We have insurance. We pay our premiums. We went to in network providers. We followed the rules. And we're still getting bled dry.

It feels frustrating as hell. Like the system isn't designed to help you. It's designed to extract every dollar it can while making you jump through hoops just to understand what you owe and why. You need a law degree and an accounting background just to read the damn bills.

I know we're not alone in this. Millions of people deal with the same thing. Some worse. Some go bankrupt. Some skip care they need because they can't afford the aftermath. That's not a healthcare system. That's a shakedown.

We'll pay what we owe. We'll make the calls. We'll fight the codes. We'll do what we have to do. But don't tell me the system isn't broken.

It's broken by design.

Thanks for reading, Joe

_{Notes: -All content is mine unless otherwise annotated. -Images are my own unless otherwise noted. -Photos edited using Linux photo editor and drawing and/or iPhone SE. -Page Dividers from The Terminal Discord.}