Medical Bills
When Tom McGrath's daughter Sarah had her appendix removed, the doctors and nurses did everything right. But when McGrath got the bill for her hospital stay, none of it made sense to him. "My Daughter's $29,000 Appendectomy" in Philadelphia Magazine is a brilliant account of McGrath's odyssey through the health care system as he tries to understand the bill. McGrath mixes equal amounts of humor, rage and bewilderment into his narrative, as he does in this passage:
Over the next few weeks, unfortunately, I started seeing and hearing the lights and sirens that haunt a wanted man. Every day when I came home from work, a new bill or statement from my insurance company was waiting for me — most of them either indecipherable or contradictory. There was a bill for “anesthesia services” of $1,326, yet the amount due was only $1,060, though neither I nor my insurance company had paid anything so far. There was a bill for “radiology services” that seemed to indicate the $209 charge was covered by insurance, but another identical one that indicated it wasn’t. My favorite showed up in December: It listed a charge for room and board of $3,100, then another for “IH miscellaneous services” of — drumroll, please — $19,742.16. I wondered whether my five-year-old daughter had been force-fed Kobe beef throughout her hospital stay, or maybe had been ordering up porn on pay-per-view.
By personalizing the story, McGrath succeeds in making a complex topic understandable and even fun to read about. www.phillymag.com/articles/top_doctors_my_daughters_29000_appendectomy/