No final results of bronchoscopy from National Jewish , though when I checked back in I was told "nothing is growing yet" (for those of you who haven't been following this saga, it's all there on The Denver Chronicles, at right), but the bill has arrived:
I reproduce it here in the interests of full disclosure. $12,000-plus and I was an outpatient and didn't even leave with a diagnosis, much less treatment! I am not faulting National Jewish, which is a splendid place, but it is a strange phenomenon, to be so well-covered by health insurance (unlike a majority of Americans who are not well-covered, or the 40 million who have no coverage at all, these costs were pre-approved by Cigna, our carrier) that you have no real concern with a price tag like this. I can't think of any other consumer purchase, if you want to look at it that way, where the consumer has no interest in questioning costs or keeping them down, or even has any idea what goes into them.
My pulmonary function test, I now see, cost over $900. I remember that -- it consisted of breathing into a machine that recorded my levels for about twenty minutes. What made it so expensive? Amortizing the undoubtedly astronomical costs of the machine? It can't be the energy used, or the time of the tester. And what happens when the machine is fully paid for? Does the cost go down? Why did it cost many tens of thousands of dollars, when my father was comatose for weeks after his second aneurysm some years ago, to keep him on a respirator? Why does that cost more to operate than, say, a large air conditioning unit? Similarly, my cardiology testing was over $1,000, though it was a ten-minute test where they stuck sensors in ten or twelve places on my body. I see that my pyschology services -- 50 minutes with a very nice C.S.W. -- cost $400. I don't think the top Freudian shrink in Manhattan bills that much for a not-quite-hour.
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