Surgeon charges $250,000 to sew up an incision. That seems a tad much.

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Sunday September 21, 2014 · 2:54 PM PDT

2014/09/21 · 14:54

I was reading this article in the New York Times today —

After Surgery, Surprise $117,000 Medical Bill From Doctor He Didn’t Know

— and I started thinking about how much greed is too much.

At some point, greed becomes not just an obstacle to containing medical costs, it becomes a threat to the entire social order.

Things like this make me thing we might have reached, or passed, that point:

Patricia Kaufman’s bills after a recent back operation at a Long Island hospital were rife with such charges, said her husband, Alan, who spent days sorting them out. Two plastic surgeons billed more than $250,000 to sew up the incision, a task done by a resident during previous operations for Ms. Kaufman’s chronic neurological condition.

Have our consciences become unshockable?

I think most people recognize there's a conflict between profit motive and health care. But for some hospitals and doctors, the conflict is apparently over — they have chosen profit above all else. Doctors and hospitals have chosen to systematically take advantage of people at the precise moment when they are maximally vulnerable:

a patient may be lying on a gurney in the emergency room or in a hospital bed, unaware that all of the people in white coats or scrubs who turn up at the bedside will charge for their services. At times, a fully trained physician is called in when a resident or a nurse, who would not charge, would have sufficed. Services that were once included in the daily hospital rate are now often provided by contractors, and even many emergency rooms are staffed by out-of-network physicians who bill separately.

I am utterly and completely disgusted. I wish I had more to say, but I don't; I am literally dumbfounded.

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Surgeon charges $250,000 to sew up an incision. That seems a tad much.

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