Just rolled the absolute hell out of my ankle while on my final trip loading up the car for a 12-hour dive with family so my plans have changed to lying in the ground and yelling which is going great
OK, injury or no, we’ve got an eclipse to see. Got some crutches, got a cane, got an ace bandage, got some ice, downed some ibuprofen, found an urgent care place in Nashville. Let’s do this thing.
A Venn diagram of the urgent care centers that exist in St. Louis and the in-network urgent care centers that my insurer claims exist in St. Louis is just two circles.
The doctor pronounced herself “shocked” that I broke no bones, based on the severity of swelling and bruising, but the two rounds of X-rays confirmed it. Just a severe sprain. I got this fancy boot that I’m sure I’ll get a $300 bill for in six months, but it helps enormously with walking.
The boot was terrible, and I had to buy a new one to replace it. (It had metal stays in the side that cinched directly onto my sprained ankle.)
I was a captive audience. I could not walk. There's no free market of boots at an urgent care facility.
I actually looked into buying a boot online. There were zero online retailers of walking boots that could ship in less than a week, zero that I could find in St. Louis, and zero that I could find around my home.
I've noticed that a particularly high rate of scam billing comes in the form of the cheap, simple orthopedic devices provided at urgent care and related facilities: slings, braces, walking casts, etc. Sometimes the medical practitioner themselves is in on it, sometimes they're actually providing you with an orthopedic device that's from a third-party supplier that will bill you separately. That's how a $10 brace becomes a $150 brace, or a $65 walking cast becomes a $743 walking cast.
@waldoj This is just how healthcare billing works. They know your insurance will only pay a few bucks for an office visit. And they also know the insurance company will let them mark up ordinary medical supplies 1000%.
For a chronic issue of my own, I’d spent a decade trying out various $30 Amazon orthopedic devices, and then I saw a specialist whose office staff handed me something nearly identical and billed my insurance $200. I guess it’s a little better? I can’t really tell.
@jamiemccarthy@waldoj I bet they also factor the likelilikelihood of bad media coverage into it. Refusing to cover a device means lawmakers are hearing about the insurance company stranding someone unable to walk out.
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