![]() “I’m currently paying a minimum of $100/month towards the remaining balance. My original bill was for $8,225 and was reduced by 40%,” she said, to a little over $5,000. “Barnes Kasson was the first hospital I visited. The two hospitals’ paperwork and applications were fairly transparent and quick, she said. At the same time, she was given an application for state financial aid, she said. She also applied for financial aid at the second hospital. That nurse made sure she was told how to apply for financial aid. “I had bills totaling about $70,000 or $80,000,” she said.Īt Barnes-Kasson, she had been seen initially by a nurse who knew her family, and who knew she was uninsured. She ultimately went on “a bunch of medications” for that, and eventually weaned herself off of them. She had had an NG tube, and there were lasting aftereffects. “It turned out my stomach was inflamed,” she said. After a couple more visits to the emergency room, she ultimately underwent an endoscopy in June, to see if she had an ulcer or gastritis. She began having pain in her stomach again. One might hope that the story would end here, but she was not so lucky. “They rushed me into emergency surgery at midnight and took it out. That was Friday, and I went back to work on Monday.” “They did a cat scan and said my appendix was very much intact,” she said. She went to the emergency room at a different hospital, Roxborough Memorial in Philadelphia, after work on April 24, and explained the situation. She went back to work, but a month later, she said, she started feeling sick again. ![]() “I had never been sick,” she explained, adding that she now regrets that decision. She had the Tricare application before she got sick, but never filled it out completely. ![]() She was eligible for Tricare under her father’s plan, she said, because she was under 26 and did not have insurance or access to insurance via work. She went home and – yes – filled out an application for insurance. When she returned to Robert Packer for a follow-up, she said, “They determined the appendix had exploded, that there was nothing left, and recommended I not have surgery.” She was released after a two-day stay, with the drains still in, where they remained for a little over a week. Ultimately, she said the doctors at Robert Packer decided that appendicitis was the correct diagnosis, and that “My appendix had started to leak toxins into my body.” They decided to put drains in her abdomen. “I went through a series of CT scans,” she said, but the hospital said its results weren’t clear enough, so she was transferred to another hospital, Robert Packer, in Sayre, Pa., where she stayed from March 15-17. The early diagnosis was an eating disorder, but it then changed after a new doctor arrived the next morning. She has always been petite, she said, weighing 100 pounds, but had dropped to 92 pounds. The hospital she went to, Barnes-Kasson in Susquehannah, Pa., decided to treat her initially for an eating disorder. She was uninsured, she said, which factored into her decision to wait it out for almost a week before she went to the emergency room. I never thought of it as appendicitis, I thought of it as the flu.” In the center of my stomach, a horrible pain. I woke up later that evening and it was excruciating. On March 8 of last year, she said: “I started to have a stomachache. So her switching coverage was a big issue. She was uninsured at the beginning of her journey, then was insured by Tricare (which covers military personnel) via her father, and then finally covered by Aetna through work. At her request, I agreed not to use her full name in writing about her, because if I did, her health history would follow her around the web forever. She sent me her bills and told her story, to help others. We reached out for the story behind the data. We met her because entered her information into our PriceCheck form as part of the WHYY The Pulse partnership with. ![]() It turned out that she had appendicitis – and ultimately the result would be not just an appendectomy, but also months of treatment, several hospitalizations, and piles of bills, and long-lasting regrets - multiple applications for financial aid, lunch hours lost to endless attempts to resolve insurance problems and an errant Social Security number that caused multiple rejected claims. Then her mom took her to the hospital, and that was the beginning of a rough ride through the health care system. She had spent a week in pain on the floor, curled up in a ball and crying, willing herself to believe her stomach hurt because she had the flu and unwilling to go to the hospital, partly because she was uninsured.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |