Pete's BLOG-Day 24,410. Still another medical horror story..

Today is Sunday, March 10, 2013. No stats today - my day off. Total miles for March so far are 20.7 miles. My weight today was 163.2 pounds.

QUOTE from Jim Doyne: " Tact is making people feel at home when you wish they were."

My THOUGHT today is about more medical horror stories in the U.S. health care system.Yesterday I wrote about Janice, the 64 year-old lady from Stamford ,Conn., who went to the hospital by ambulance (4 miles) because of chest pains. She was sent home after doctors decided she had indigestion with a $21,000 bill after 3 hours in the ER. Now, some more details about Janices'a bill.

- On Janice's bill was this:  An "NM MYO REST/SPEC EJCT MOT MUL" was billed at $7,997.54. That's a stress test using a radioactive dye that is tracked by an X-ray computed tomography, or CT, scan. Medicare would have paid Stamford Hospital $554 for the test.
- Janice was charged an additional $872.44 just for the dye used in the test. The regular stress test patients are more familiar with, in which arteries are monitored electronically with an electrocardiograph, would have cost $1,200 and Medicare would have paid $96 for it. Many doctors consider this test sufficient instead of the CT one.
- Stamford Hospital probably paid $250,000 for the CT equipment. So the more CT scans the doctors order the sooner they will get it paid for and the quicker it begins profiting from its purchase. Doctors in the U.S. order 71% more CT scans than THE GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM IN GERMANY. And the cardiologist in the ER gave Janice a separate bill for $600 to read the test results on top of the $342 he charged for examining her.
- The use of CT scans had more than quadrupled in recent decades.

- There is a bill before Congress that would discourage doctors from ordering multiple CT scans on the same patient by paying them less per test to read multiple tests of the same patient. Guess sho is opposing this bill by running a fullpage ad in the POLITICO newspaper  on Nov. 14? The answer is -  THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF RADIOLOGY. The health care industry spends more on lobbying that any other group in the U.S.