Pete's BLOG-Day 26,413. Some more unbelievable medical bills.

Today is Wednesday, March 13, 2013. My stats today: 10 minutes of yoga, 10 minutes of lifting weights and 45 minutes of walking = 2.5 miles for a March total of 28.5 miles. My weight was 162.6 pounds.

QUOTE from Jim Doyne: "When a person gets too big for his britches, their hat doesn't fit either."

My THOUGHTS today are about some more unbelievable medical bills.
- MD Anderson charged Sam Recchi $7 each for ALCOHOL PREP PAD. This is a little square of cotton used to apply alcohol to an injection. A box of 200 can be bought online for $1.91.
- MD Anderson charged $1,791 a day for a 'specialized and personalized" room.
- Biogen Idec-Genentech can make, test, package and ship the cancer drug RITUXAN  for as little as $300 - then sell it to MDAnderson for $3,000 to $3,500 whereupon they  sold it Recchi for $13,702.
- A cancer patient in California (Steven) was treated at Seton Medical Center in Daly City, CA. He got his first bill for $348,000. He was charged $18 each for 88 diabetic strips that Amazon sells in boxes of 50 for $27.85; $24 each for 19 niacon pills that are sold in drugstores for about a nickel apiece; four boxes of sterile gauze pads for $77 each; $13,225 a day (2 days)  in the intensive-care unit; 12 days in the critical unit at $7,315 a day ; one day in a standard room (all of which totaled $120,116 over 15 days). And he was charged $20,886 for CT scans and $24,251 for lab work.
- Steven died 11 months after his diagnosis in January, 2011. His wife, Alice made $40,000 a year running child-care center in her home.  Needless to say there was no way Alice could pay these medical bills. So a lady named Patricia Stone came to her aid. Patricia is a billing advocate who helps middle-class people with their medical bills and insurance claims. Patricia persuaded Seton Medical Center to write off $297,000 of its $348,000 bill. Her argument was simple - there was no way Alice could pay now or in the future, though they would scrape together $3,000 as a show of good faith. With the $3,000 and the $50,000 paid by the United Healthcare Insurance, she got a 85% discount.

Maybe there is a God afterall.