The emergency room did not treat my puncture wound. They just looked at it. They gave me a tetanus shot and send me home. That shot cost me almost $1,000 -- well not me my insurance carrier. Something is very wrong when you have to go to a health department location to get a tetanus shot or pay almost $1,000.
I just called the health department they charge $55 and it is at least a 45 minute wait they said (don't know if I trust that). It would also have taken me about an hour and half (round trip) to get there - not in traffic. I think I made the right choice for me -- not for our economy. Yes, I am selfish sometimes too.
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| Miami Locations of the Health Department |
10 comments:
I got mine last month as part of my regular physical. Doctor looked at my charts and told me that I was due. Shot administered, sore arm for the next 4 days.
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You are lucky Rick. I was told that doctors in Florida don't administer them anymore. Maybe it is a Dade County thing.
It is not at all obvious that $896.28 will change hands. I bet that is the rack rate. All insurance companies have deals by which they only pay a discounted rate. I was once hospitalized for a long complicated stay. The charge was well over half a million. When in due course the paperwork from my insurance company arrived, I learned that my insurance company paid about 20% of that, I was on the hook for about 4%, and the hospital wrote the rest off pursuant to its deal with the insurer. But wrote off is sort of a misnomer, since it never really expected to be able to collect that amount unless I had happened to be a rich foreigner or a poor uninsured person.
This is why getting everyone insured is so important.
I don't understand. Why can't a regular primary care physician give a basic shot like this? Is it something over their heads? Is some basic public health concern? What? Maybe some health officials can tell us why.
I was told it didn't have a long shelf life and the small amount of requests didn't pay for them to stock it. That is why I was surprised to find that the drug stores didn't carry it, even though it said they did online. I called CVS, Walgreens and Publix.
Insurance is not health care. A shot is a minor treatment that should be handled with a set rate structure. What you are looking at borders on fraud.
Weird. Last year during my annual exam at my OB/GYN he suggested a tetanus booster and gave it to me right then and there. I was thinking he might be padding the services he could charge for, but it turns out he was doing me a favor. Who knew?
Just a quick plug for the county health department. We were traveling to Egypt and Africa a while back and needed a series of shots. It was a bit of a trip but they were efficent and quick and even gave us flu shots. I was impressed. But you are totally right - tetanus shots should not be a hassle.
It's called a wallet biopsy. Those that can pay support those that cannot. We pretty much already have socialized healthcare. Let's make it official and offer some preventative care to reduce the load on emergency services.
I went to a local Urgent Care Provider in Danville, Va today and asked how much a tetanus shot would be. They took about five minutes to look up the cost and then told me it would be $75 and I had to pay the cost out of pocket because they did not bill insurance for shots. By the way, I have Medicare Insurance and I could not use this. The only thing I got was the tetanus shot by the nurse. She said if the doctor looked at the wound then they could bill my insurance for the shot...I didn't need the doctor to look at the wound because I did all that they would do..clean it with peroxide and put an antibodic cream on it. I just needed the tetanus shot because the time had run out since I last had one.
Talk about a rip off.
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