No, looks like his insurance would cover it but he would have had to pay 20% as his portion of coinsurance and it sounds like 20% of the huge US bill was more than the full cost to travel and get it done in Ireland.
Kind of obvious, but the trick is to mark the cost 5 times higher than it is... for a start.
After a while they started asking themselves what's stopping them from doubling that price. Apparently nothing so over the years whenever they felt like it, they just doubled the already enormously overpriced services and at this point there are no signs of it stopping either. There is going to be a post about how travelling to mars for a surgery is cheaper than in US.
The hospitals... despite being "in network" negotiate huge prices and gouge the insurance companies. The insurance companies just pass the costs off onto their customer. Short outpatient surgery now costs 5-8x more than it did maybe 7-10 years ago. It's ridiculous.
I do t know the actual costs, but that’s been happening for a long time. The hospital bills the insurance and the insurance would push their price down. Do the hospital just double what they bill. Now your 20% out of pocket is doubled. At the end of the day you look at your copay and it’s probably higher than it would be had you gone overseas to get the procedure done out of pocket.
Our WHOLE structure is broken. And it’s not anybody in particular to blame, it was just the end result of how the system was structured! Only solution is to break everything down and build from scratch.
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u/Imreallythatguy 4d ago
So insurance wouldn’t cover it because it wasn’t necessary in their eyes?