What I love most about this post is the bill: Pharmacy/IV, $126.23 ... Supplies, $51.00 ... Miscellaneous, $1739.00 ... Bill padding, priceless.

What the heck is all that misc????? When something represents 90% of total costs, that's not miscellaneous. That's like if your dinner tab said Soda x 2: $4.00, Miscellaneous: $49.00. That's ridiculous.

I have often said that I would LOVE to find a "midwife" pediatrician; without exception, I have gotten better advice on child health questions from my midwife friends than from any of the pediatricians my kids have seen. I double check EVERYTHING I hear from any ped now because I've gotten so much bad advice from them since my oldest was born.

I love how $1700+ is labeled "Misc." You could put any number wanted there couldn't you?

Perhaps the "Misc." is a charge for breathing the air in the ER and occupying their space??

My midwife has wholeheartedly offered her stitching services in the past to me. If I ever have a need, I plan on taking her up on the offer, even if I have health insurance.

What a scam.

they HAVE to by law give you a line by line charge for those miss charges - ASK FOR IT! wait until you see what they charge you for - it is beyond sick...not to mention many of the midwives i know would do a totally fab job of doing stitches esp on such an easy area as the chin and the baby is pretty much passed out! ;)

PS--I'm glad the baby is ok. :)

WTF is Misc anyway? I tried to call and ask about that when I took William in to the lab to get is Bili count done (he was jaundiced at birth) and I got the run around.

i owe my maternal fetal health doctor about 1300 JUST for her to come say hi and make conversation with me while i was at the hospital for 5 days. there was nothing else that she did besides talk!!
it's bs.

Of course you knew I was going to come along with my all-too-recent chin split story. Since "part 1" of my story was pretty much identical to yours (except I missed girls night out instead of date night), I'll share "part 2" - getting the damn stitches removed.

At the end of our 6 hour ER ordeal, our discharge instructions included having a follow-up visit with our pediatrician on day 5. So Monday morning, I dutifully called my pediatrician. The woman who answered the phone said, "I don't know why they tell people that - we don't remove stitches." Waaah? I can only imagine it is because they don't get reimbursed an adequate amount, because it's not rocket science. I was annoyed. I like my pediatrician, and would have welcomed a chance to bring my kid in for something relatively straightforward just to keep our relationship going between yearly visits.

So I called another pediatrician who I happen to know - in fact she used to work with my pedi but just recently went out on her own. She said, "yep, I take stitches out, but I can't do it for your daughter since she's not a patient of mine." I can only assume that this response is rooted in the fear of taking care of a patient without knowing their whole medical history, lest they get sued for something. Either that, or the reimbursement doesn't cover the administrative costs of starting a new chart, doing the billing, etc.

So I called the walk-in clinic in town and they said, "we can take the stitches out, but your insurance might not cover it because we didn't put them in. Normally we bill a global fee for putting them in and taking them out. The fee to take them out will be $160, and you can either check with your insurance or plan to cover it out of pocket."

So my remaining option was going back to the ER where they put the stitches in. When we were there getting the stitches, we waited with every kid in the New Haven area with flu-like symptoms and learned after 4 hours in the waiting room that none of the staff had yet had the H1N1 vaccine. I also had a lovely moment of ringing the staff to see if, you know, if it's not too much to ask, they wouldn't mind wiping up the fresh blood next to where we were sitting.

So what did I do? I took them out myself. And as a midwife, I don't know why I doubted that I could do it competently. It took some coaxing from my facebook friends and a little googling to get up the nerve. And it was super easy and sort of a nice moment between me and my daughter. I don't know that I would go near her face with my suturing tools though to stitch the thing in the first place (leg or arm, possibly...)

I haven't yet gotten my bill, but I had enough of a lesson in fragmentation of health care that I feel like I could teach a class on what's wrong with our system now!

:)

When Jameson was about 1 year old, I accidentally shut his finger in the doorjamb and broke off almost all his fingernail. We went to the ER, where they determined that it was too small to be worth taking an X-ray and splinting if it was broken. The doctor walked in, yanked off what was left of his fingernail, slapped a bandaid on it, and walked back out. We got a bill for $400. That's one fancy Band-aid.

Amy, if I still lived in CT (which I did until a year ago), I would be showing up at your door for any needed stitches from now on. Great idea, Jill,

I love this: "You can draft a consent form that states that I am aware that _________ (x body part) is not a perineum but I trust you to stitch it anyway."

P.S. Poor little punkin!

I just had a client whose one-year-old split her chin in the same way. Mom called me to come evaluate. Instead of sutures (which I would have done), we decided to use my DermaBond (medical grade Super Glue). The DermaBond took 5 seconds to apply and closed the wound immediately. Within 5 days, it was so closed, the glue fell off. Today, her chin looks fabulous with just a tiny scar.

Every mom should keep DermaBond around. You can get it at www.sutures.com.

Man, I should show you our statement for roughly 6 weeks of NICU facility charges, but I think I'll keep my Pavlovian neurosis about checking the mail to myself.

Careful of that super glue stuff! When my 3rd son was about 2, he tripped and whacked the bridge of his nose on the coffee table. When it was still bleeding 2 hours later, I decided to take him into the ER (of course, this was after the ped office was closed). The doctor looked like it was his first week on the job, both in terms of age and nerves. As his trembling hand took the tube of glue to my son's nose, I thought to myself "How do they stop that from rolling into the eye?"....at which point, a bead of glue slid down my son's nose and into his eye where it glued his eye shut. They spent the next 1/2 hour trying to unglue his eye again, with the doctor's hand shaking more than ever. He's none the worse for wear (my son, that is...not sure the doctor will ever recover).

what a wonderful idea, Jill!
I've superglued a gaping wound on my son's toe before. I had three little ones at home with no one around to help me out. It wasn't worth going to the ER.

Don't hate me but after reading this all I can think is, "Oh, Canada! My home and native land!".

Ugh, ya crazy to see bills like that! We have a high deductible, so we pretty much pay a sky high amount until that deductible is met. So last year....$1000 each for hubby and I to receive two bags of fluid each at urgent care from being really dehydrated from a stomach bug.

This year, paid $475 at the outpatient surgery/recovery area at the hospital to literally walk-in, receive the Rhogam shot, and walk back out. Total time: less than 5 minutes. i would care, but I will meet my deductible and co-payment limit no matter what this year anyway since I I'm having a baby in the next month.

We can barely afford this coverage....still better than none...I think.

This summer my 5 year old got a dried black bean stuck in her ear canal. Of course it was right at bedtime and non of the urgent care places remove foreign bodies. So, after sucking it out with a straw and super glue on the end of a Q-tip failed, we headed to the ER. They took her temp and a nurse and a doc shined a light in her ear. Then the doc told me that he couldn't do it (he really gave me the vibe that he didn't WANT to do it) and we'd have to go to an ENT. Rrrrrrrrrg. Waste of time and money!!! Not wanting to wait till the next day we called an a friend who is an ENT about an hour away. He was kind enough to give it a try that night. He got it out with his micro-tube super suction machine (Apparently my daughter wasn't the first to get something smaller than her elbow stuck in her ear. . .)

A few weeks later we got the bill from the ER and had an outrageously large charge for shining two lights and taking a temp. I called their billing dept and asked for an itemized bill. When I got it I saw that there was a CHARGE for FOREIGN BODY REMOVAL!!! They had billed my insurance for a procedure that was not performed. We clearly left the ER with the bean still in her ear. So after a few phone calls reminding the ER that billing for things that were not done was INSURANCE FRAUD, our bill was re-issued and reduced to about $129 (still crazy high for waving around two lights and a digital thermometer!!) but way better than before.

Yeah, Insurance reform for sure!!

Got a bill like that the other day myself... still haven't figured out what one $700 item was for, but I totally disagree that we need health care reform... what we desperately need is MEDICAL INSURANCE and TORT REFORM. American health care is top notch, the problem is how it gets billed without the consumer involved: Why can't 15 minutes save you 15% on medical insurance????http://outsidethecapitalbeltway.blogspot.com/2009/08/fifteen-minutes-could-save-you-15-on.html

When I was in midwifery school, we happened to be studying suturing (seriously) and a mother showed up with a son who she had birthed at the birth center, and he had a cut over his eyebrow. The midwife stitched him up for free as a demonstration.

I think all parents should have first aid and combat medic classes *for free*. That way, we could deal with all the bizarre punctures, gashes, and disasters, on our own, with confidence, and stay out of the medical system entirely.