Woman Billed $700 For Waiting 7 Hours In ER Without Treatment

A hospital in Georgia just charged a woman $700 to wait in their emergency room, without ever being seen by a doctor. No medication was dispensed, no medical advice was given, no doctor or nurse attended to her, no medical professional even knew she was there - and she ended up leaving after 7 hours without being seen.

A few weeks later, she received a $700 bill from the hospital, which told her that even though she didn’t receive any services, she still owed it for stepping into the ER waiting room. That’s not a billing error or an oversight, let’s make one thing very clear - Not only is American healthcare the worst in the developed world terms of price, outcome, efficiency, and equity, the cost of American healthcare is fundamentally based on a combination of insurance fraud and political corruption to generate obscene profits for insurance companies which spend billions of dollars bribing corporate friendly politicians in order to monetize the basic human need to avoid death and disease.

Here’s how they do it: you may have noticed that it’s actually impossible to find out what your healthcare will cost before you get it - which makes it impossible to comparison shop for healthcare, doctors, and medical treatments, which is also complicated by the fact that it’s impossible to do those things anyway while you’re sick, injured, or dying, which is exactly when those costs jump into the hundreds of thousands of dollars without you knowing or being informed. All of that effectively guarantees that IF you need immediate medical treatment, even if you have insurance, there is an almost certain chance that you will walk out of that hospital with unpayable medical debt.

And that’s by design, because despite what politicians who are funded by private insurance companies might tell you, American healthcare is not a free market. Your healthcare cost is actually determined by a negotiation between your insurance company and your healthcare provider, both of which are for-profit organizations with no competition, no transparency, and no incentive to make healthcare more affordable. In fact, their only real goal is to find a number high enough that if you file for medical bankruptcy, which is the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US, your assets can be seized to cover the cost.

And they’re able to do that because the foundation of privatized healthcare is that people are willing to pay literally any amount of money to not die, so providers of medical services can charge, literally any amount of money, for the simple reason that healthcare is obviously not a commodity, it’s a basic human right, and arguably one of the most fundamental. This is probably a good place to remind you that the United States is the ONLY industrialized country in the entire world without socialized healthcare, which every single country that can afford it, does as soon as they’re able - because it’s a total no-brainer to make sure your population isn’t actively sick or dying or in extreme poverty to avoid death and disease.

But America chose a different path, and around the early 1980s, and especially in the early 1990s, healthcare costs started to rise dramatically while the rest of the world implemented socialized healthcare. And I swear to God, we’re not doing this on purpose, but this stems from Ronald Reagan, who at this point we think must be some kind of time traveling demon genius because every time we trace back a major American crisis in 2021, we land on Ronald Reagan signing a horrifying bill with a huge smile on his fucking face.

Anyway, in the early 1980s while other nations imposed controls on healthcare prices, the United States simultaneously deregulated the healthcare, insurance, and pharmaceutical industries, while cutting social programs that improved the public health. And by the early 1990s, as the population got sicker, those industries realized that there was nothing stopping them from charging each other more because 100% of that cost was shouldered by people who were sick and dying, or if they were too broke, it would be covered by the taxpayer.

The thing is, in countries that do have socialized healthcare, prices are low because the government is the only reliable buyer of medical services, and so they have actually negotiating power with hospitals and pharmaceutical companies who have to compete to provide the highest quality at the lowest cost. In fact, that’s what’s so absurd and horrifying about the American healthcare system - not only is it, by far, the most expensive - but America has THE WORST healthcare outcomes among all high-income industrialized nations - we are dead last in almost every single metric.

The myth that people in other countries have to pay disproportionately more in taxes and stand in line for hours to get substandard healthcare is so bizarre because it explicitly describes the situation that Americans are in, except instead of paying a couple hundred dollars a year more in taxes, they end up paying tens of thousands more in healthcare premium, deductibles, and co-pays for insurance that doesn’t even cover everything.

American healthcare is, fundamentally, a long-running fraud on the American people that leaves them sicker and poorer. This woman in Georgia waited 7 hours in the emergency room, only to be ignored, and then charged $700 for the privilege. If you don’t see that as a symptom of a totally broken system caused by the continued privatization of basic human rights while the rest of the world thrives in a proven system, then you’re either lying or being lied to.