Reminds me of the age-old excuse, “it broke.”

Sounds like a defective product to you?

Sounds like a load of horse maure to me.

As does his claim of earning only $7,500 last year.

Here is a guy who does custom woodworking on yachts, not for the manufacturer, but for the wealthy owners. $7,500? I guess if he works 10 days a year. That’s the income he reports, in order to be able to collect food stamps and other government benefits.

Another way you can tell the guy is a BS artist? When you have no money and are faced with the high cost of living in the US, the solution of choice is never ‘I think I’ll move to France’.

I broke my leg in a motorcycle accident 30 years ago when I had no insurance. Didn’t find out it was broken for a week, because I had no insurance and didn’t go to the hospital until I still couldn’t walk after that week.

You never go to the hospital for injured ribs unless you are in tremendous pain. The treatment for broken ribs in a hospital or out is the same – nothing at all. You just wait for them to get better.

That’s a little harsh, I think. He knew he’d have to pay. The story seems to be more about the very high cost for care he didn’t ask for in the first place. He wanted to go to a different hospital, where he’d qualify for reduced rates. He didn’t ask for a CT scan. He was charged $2000 for a room he spent very little time in.

The majority of the cost was the $5000 activation fee (since waived) and the CT scan. The first was over his objections (recall he didn’t ask for an ER, and specifically not that one), the second he didn’t request. That’s $8000 that somebody else decided he should pay ($10K including the room; I’ll bet he’d have been willing to wait in the hall for two grand). It’s not him trying to skip out on $12K in medical charges. It’s him getting charged $12K without asking for the care in the first place.

Certainly, the high cost and the CT scan are partly the result of the malpractice bar. And the ambulance crew can be forgiven for wanting him to be seen asap; had there been something wrong that was made worse by the long ride his chosen hospital, they could well have been sued for that.

So this guy is paying not for his own actions, but for somebody else’s tort-enforced idea of what he should get. He probably would have accepted (and paid for) an x-ray, a tape job, and instructions to come back if he got headaches or blood in his urine. Instead, he got a lot of unecessary tests and a twelve-grand tab.

Unwarrented defensive medicine is part of the “high-cost” problem.

The part of the $12,000 for those who do not pay or underpay would not be avoided by insurance, as the premium also would incorporate those costs.

The bank can REPO my car if I fail to pay, but one can not REPO medical treatment. That is why we have prepayment medical insurance.

These are difficult problems.

It is my understanding that the coffee case was triggered by a sky high hospital bill. The lady sued after she was denied help my the McDonalds.

The funny thing to me is that you would think malpracice suits would be the way of combating malpractice in a system free of licensure, where doctors could specialize or offer various levels of expertise at various prices. Instead, we have a system where it’s difficult and expensive to become a doctor, and you must generalize, and we have out-of-control litigation against doctors.

Add to that the fact that (1) virtually everyone uses third-party providers and (2) that third-party provider is often the government, and you have…

The worst possible world in terms of the price of medical care?

The most immediate question: he’s already sponging off his relatives; presumably he has at least 6 relatives; that’s only $2k each (less after the bill reduction). Why can’t he just have them pay the bill?

Of course, if they won’t, maybe he could sue because they left the impression that they would bail him out of any situation…

Palmer was heading toward the Golden Gate Bridge and then home to Richmond. Suddenly his brakes locked, sending the motorcycle into a slide.

Nobody doing anything wrong and out of the blue, the brakes just suddenly lock up? Sounds like a defective product suit to me. Now, what deep pocket made this motorcycle?

That $12,000 bill is subsidizing the uninsured people who use the hospital and don’t pay, and, to a lesser extent, the Medicare use where reimbursement ranges from low to inadequate.

Just so. Medicare pays a fixed amount under its “prospective payment system” for groupings of care related to certain diagnoses. These amounts are not negotiated, and are often below the hospital’s cost of treatment. Hospitals write off millions of dollars of unreimbursed care rendered to uninsured patients. This underpayment and nonpayment has to be made up somewhere. That “somewhere” ends up being private third-party health insurance payors and, indirectly, the businesses and individual that pay the ever-increasing premiums for health insurance. Since many health care insurers pay hospitals based on a percentage of charges, hospital charges stay high so they can cover the Medicare and uninsured losses, and maintain a positive margin.