f13.net

So a few weeks ago i am awakened by the most intense pain i have ever experienced. Now i am a human who has a relatively high pain threshold but this was another level. The pain was originating from a molar in the back of my mouth. At first i tried to just suck it up till the morning so i could schedule an appointment, but that was not possible.

I lay in bed for hours mewling like a dying cat before driving myself to the hospital. By some act of god i got in to see a doctor from the emergency room almost instantly. He checks the tooth says i in all likely hood have an abscess and gives me a prescription for some pain medication. On a side note, the feeling of the pain medication overcoming the intense agony was one of the most pleasurable moments of my life.

Having no medical insurance i already was expecting to pay out of pocket. About a week later i receive a bill for 200ish bucks. I paid said bill and thought the matter was closed. About 1-2 weeks after paying the first bill i receive another for 1089$. I call the number on the bill and explained that i had already previous paid 200$ and that some mistake must be occuring.

They calmly explained that the first bill was for something ancillary to the bill they sent.

So i get to pay 1,200 dollars for about 2 mins worth of a doctors time and a fucking prescription that cost me near 100 dollars. So 1,300 bucks so i can survive to then pay a dentist damn near an additional 2,000 dollars.

How in the fuck is this possible. I mean i don't have fucking insurance this is coming straight out of pocket. Why would emergency care be so fucking expensive for such a brief amount of time?

It has got to be a rare thing for someone lacking insurance to be able to pay 1k just to SEE a doctor. I just don't understand how healthcare can be so fucked up. Also it was MORE expensive for me to pay for root canal/crown than my father had to pay from the SAME fucking dentist.

If you are insured you get a flat 20% reduction from the bill.

Our healthcare system works best is a) you're wealthy, b) you're well educated, and c) you have LOTS of insurance.  If you don't fit into all three of those, you're pretty much fucked.  If you do a search on healthcare among these threads you'll see that we've gone over this at length. 

Sorry to hear about your situation.  I understand completely... I've done some ER work. 

I just dont understand the logic in the "pricing" me being uninsured yet able to pay these bills has got to be a rare occurrence. Do they just want to create overwhelming debt and then milk the uninsured?

It's a negotiating position, not an invoice.  If you were insured, they'd bill the insurance company for it, the insurance company would say "no, we'll pay half", they'd bill the insurance company for the remaining half, and at some point it would get easier to squeeze you than keep trading paper back and forth.  Then, at the end of the quarter, most of what the insurance company paid would get "rebated" back to them.  You'd have paid $200-300, the insurance company about the same (even though on paper you have a 20% co-pay).

You're talking with the wrong department, there's usually another office (I forget the name, and I think it isn't always the same anyway) that has the authority to knock that down to what they would actually collect normally (so about half).  But if you want to get steamed: That first $200 was probably the bill from the ER doc for that 2 minutes of his time.  They generally bill separately.

--Dave

But remember, we have the best medical system in the world!

But ya, you should be able to negotiate that down a bit.

My medical insurance costs me $1200 a year even if I never use it.

So, welcome to the health care world. I'd recommend you just own up and get insurance, especially if you are young. The disasters won't cost you anywhere near as much, and you should actively use your regular checkups for the preventative part of your health.

I think i will just hold out till after the collapse of the entire healthcare industry. It cant be that far off.

Don't do that, they'll make your life hell, hassle your relatives and boss, and shoot your credit rating to shit.  And next time you show up in the ER, you'll find it somewhat less responsive if you're not genuinely at risk of death.

--Dave

I have already paid the bills. I meant withhold purchasing personal and comprehensive insurance.

Wait a moment...you are telling me they will hassle my relatives and boss?!? No fucking way can that be legal. And what happens if i dispute the bill in regards to my credit score and request justification for that expense (which they are law bound to provide).

There are no guidelines for the fee they can force upon me? What prevents them from claiming an emergency room visit cost 10,000$?

If it makes you feel any better I paid $1100 a month for my insurance for approximately 16 months not long ago. Go America!

That better cover some amazing things. I wouldl be expecting cybernetic implants for 17 grand.

Between them, an employer and employee will generally pay $20-25K a year for your standard 80/20 PPO plan.  HMO's are a bit cheaper, but you get pencil-pushers deciding what your medical treatment should be, and if you need a specialist and your HMO is under-staffed on them (and they almost always will be for anything but the most common "specialties" like OB-Gyn), you can wait months for an appointment unless your Primary Care Physician is prepared to bet his job you have something that will be fatal if they don't get you right in.

That's one thing that annoys me: The "OMG Scary Socialism!" argument against a government-run healthcare system is that it would be run like an HMO, but with actual laws and political accountability limiting how badly you'll get screwed.  Except that the assholes using the talking points don't seem to realize that for most people, they are already fighting with bureaucrats over their healthcare.

When my mother had gallstones, her HMO tried to keep kicking the can down the road until her COBRA eligibility expired.  Her doctor was forced to talk to her in code "It's VERY IMPORTANT you keep taking your pills.  If YOU DON'T TAKE THEM every day as prescribed, your condition will become serious and we'll have to do surgery IN THREE MONTHS."  She was 5 months from losing her COBRA coverage.  Then he had a conversation with his medical assistant outside the open exam room door about how the HMO had denied coverage for someone because pharmacy records showed they hadn't been filling the prescriptions for their medications.

Every single day in this country, people die because insurance companies are focused on not providing any more care than they can avoid.  Government-run healthcare couldn't possibly be any worse.

--Dave

EDIT: Sorry, I didn't realize that I was in GenDisc instead of politics.  But I'm not editing that stuff out, Schild is reading this and he can redirect it if he wants.

Because as everyone knows Capitalism is the answer to everything, therefore what you have experienced is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

I mean, if the government were to run health care, it would be inefficient and expensive!

When we went back to visit my in-laws in Colorado a few years back, my wife came down with a mild case of pneumonia (which is a problem at 15,000 feet of altitude). Stupidly we didn't have travel insurance and, as neither of us were resident in the US, we didn't have health insurance that the hospital would accept. She refused to be admitted to the ER on the grounds that we couldn't afford it but the episode still ended up costing us a shade under five grand for the drugs and the doctors fees.

Just on general principle I wouldn't pay that emergency room bill.  $2000 for a root canal and cap?  Dude, get another dentist.  That should run you around $1000, tops.

Should cost under 150 USD to get a molar in a different country. Paid 60 to have mine extracted earlier this year. Flawless job.
For 2 k you might as well travel to another country.

Back when I was unemployed I did indeed travel to Spain and had 2 cavities taken care of. Airplane ticket cost ~$600. Fillings ~$200. Cost in the US without insurance for a similar proceedure ~$800.

They price the ER so high because they cannot legally turn you away regardless of ability to pay. So they have to end writing off a lot of the money they should be making in the ER to collections agencies, because most ER patients can't pay. If they were legally allowed to turn you away, they could charge less - but then you could only get help if you were insured or had a visible means of paying right then and there. It's part of why the system is so fucked.

I recently also had two wisdom teeth removed that did not require the oral surgeon to be present. So the extractions were priced as any other tooth would be. Fucking 300 dollars PER tooth with additional fees and shit for the x-rays. Cost me almost a grand just to get them removed!

Am i really getting ripped off? Another friend of mine had a root canal/crown and it also cost him 2k and he HAD dental insurance. I thought these prices were pretty standard for the area (washington state).

As to the emergency room fees. I was under the impression emergency fee's were heavily subsidized by the government for the very fact that nobody really has a choice both patient/hospital. So the hospitals end up being reimbursed regardless if its paid or not.

I am just really astounded that the current state of healthcare is something viewed as anything but a disaster. How could a socialized medical system be any worse.

A random accident in which you get very hurt but still able bodied should not destroy you financially for life.

ouch sorry to hear that.

I learned that lesson some time ago cept the bill was closer to 10k when i injured my back while uninsured.

Sad thing is you probalby could have found a dentist or oral surg. who would have seen you for that at a fraction of the cost.

That's actually pretty brilliant. I'm going to have to remember that next time.

I just thought of "Bargain hunting" in regards to a medical procedure was asking for some horrible situation to go down.

You hear about all those people that do so in regards to plastic surgery and end up looking like mutants!

In all fairness America has some of the best plastic surgeons in the world because it's something you only get done (generally) as a luxury thing so the people who do it have money. If you've got money and are getting something medical you're probably not going to be looking for the cheapest guy you can find and so anyone who's good charges a shitload.

The exception to this of course is people who go into it hoping to do some good. They're too busy restructuring jaws and trying to repair massive burn scarring to give you a boob job. (this isn't to totally denigrate people who go into cosmetic surgery. Making people feel good about themselves is a worthwhile career and there is, apparently, a very different set of challenges in that line of work. I imagine the challenges involve where to park the 3rd Porsche :grin:)

Come to Canada and get gay married for relatively cheap healthcare. :why_so_serious:

FIFY.  :awesome_for_real:

And yes, gryeyes, you're getting fleeced.

It was entirely unintentional and a happy coincidence. Dentist costs in Spain, out of pocket with no insurance, no government healthcare assistance at all, is still reasonable.

The irony is, the fillings material that they used in Spain showed up later on US dental x-rays as cavities, and the fothermucking US dentist 'fixed' these two entirely non-existent cavities.

I am certain he did it entirely by accident, and didn't charge you for it  :oh_i_see:

Oh no, I got charged. Thankfully, I had work insurance that was only a little cash. Still, I will not be giving that dimwit any more business.

Hi!  I'm the Emergency Department RN, I'm also a Paramedic, we've been bitching about healthcare for a while now welcome aboard!

What happened is that they made a law called EMTALA, which is part of the COBRA reform bill (COBRA is pretty broad, there is another section in it about how they change your health insurance if you switch jobs and providers).  It is an anti-dumping law and/or "fairness" law.
Links:
http://www.emtala.com/faq.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_and_Active_Labor_Act
http://www.aaem.org/emtala/
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/42/1395dd.html
http://www.ena.org/government/emtala/

What used to happen is that you could show up to an ER (I'm using that since more use it than Emergency Department, I have a 25 patient rooms in my ED, not just one big emergency room), they could ask for insurance, see if you are covers or able to pay, then refuse to see you if you couldn't pay or had coverage.  Plus there were dumping going on where patients were seen in the ER, the hospital staff refused to admit them, so they would send them to another hospital and let them absorb the patients without insurance.

What EMTALA did:
1.  Everyone who shows up to a participating ER and/or OB-GYN gets a seen (medical screening exam by a doc or mid-level...I won't go into how I don't think RN's should be doing that part).
2.  Everyone will get treatment up to that facilities abilities.
3.  Those needing admission will be admitted, those that need admission to a more specialized care will get appropriate transfer to the correct facility.

What it didn't do:
1.  Pay for it.

As to the cost, yeah $1000 sounds pretty freaking insane, but that doc spent a shit load of years getting to where he is, he isn't cheap.  Problem is you went to the most expensive place to get dental care, where a dentist might have seen you and charged you less especially if you were willing to pay some cash up front.

@ Engels, what type of filling material did they use in Spain?  The NATO doc's and troops were using the same amalgam (metal mix) we were using for filling in the back.  The plastic fillings won't seal a lot of times, causing decay to creep in under and around those types of fillings, hell it happens to the best placed metal filling too.  What you would need is someone who could look at your x-ray and see if there is a shadow next to the filling, shadows are sign of decay.  What type of x-ray did they use anyway?

I think most of the USA doesn't have a clue how health care works, or how bills are paid.  I had to explain that socialism isn't bad, and works way better on some things, like oh...cops, fire, EMS, health care, roads, schools, but hell most people think I want to not let them choose there own doc.

I can't remember the specifics, nor what x-ray type they used but after they became suspicious that what they were drilling into wasn't a cavity, the looked at the charts from Spain that I had -handed to them- before the whole mess even started. Then there was some hmming and hawing, and finally the dentist said that the spanish were using an amalgam that showed up slightly lighter than US fillings material, and hence they thought it was some decay. It may have been a plastic filling, but I don't think it was a cavity under them, since it had hardly been more than 2 months since the Spanish dental session. I have very solid teeth for the most part.

But I did not even receive treatment! I got a prescription for pain killers and told to go see a dentist. Which i did.

I took up literally 2 minutes of the doctors time. 1,200 bucks for for 120 seconds of a ER doctors time is insanity.

This happened to a housemate of mine a few years ago.  He was unemployed, uninsured, and I took him to the ER one weekend day because he was really goddamn sick and decided he'd better see a doctor.  He got hit with a $1000ish bill.  He explained that he had no insurance and asked if they could do anything at all if he could pay some of it cash.  It got knocked down to about $300, which he could afford.  They didn't have to do the back-and-forth with an insurance company.  In the end, everyone was reasonably happy.

I knew some medical types when I lived in Provo (the 20-something social scene, such as it is in the only city on earth that is majority Mormon and contains BYU, is heavily represented with nursing and medical students).  One guy I ran into was talking about how he was going to take an ER residency, then work for an HMO while pulling as many ER shifts on the side as he could stand and get.  When I asked him why he wanted ER shifts, he told me it was because an ER doc will bill for 50-60 hours in a single 12 hour shift, and because their billing services make sure it gets in the mail the next business day they usually get to collect most of that (for the same reason gryeyes paid it: People assume it's their ER bill, think "that isn't so bad", and pay it promptly).  At $100/hour (this was 12 years ago), that was his best way to get his student loan debt paid back and build a nest egg for either starting or buying into a practice.

--Dave

You received treatment.  You went to the ER with a non-emergent issue, plus dental care is limited to dentist, so the ER doc and staff can give you pain and infection control, we can't place fillings, do root canals, or pull or replace teeth.  We can put your jaw back in place if you dislocate it, thank god the dentist haven't claimed that as their territory.

You presented with a complaint, someone checked you in (god I hope someone took your vitals and wrote up what you were there for) which is considered the nursing assessment (done by a RN or NREMT-P I hope too), then the chart went to the doc, he came in, looked you over, formed up a diagnosis, and then gave you treatment of prescriptions.

Usually you get 2 bills, one for the Doc (and Mid-Level, that is another story too, ER Doc's with a PA/FNP working under them, get a payment for there work), one for the Nursing/Hospital bill.  The ER Doc will be cheaper than the Nursing/Hospital part (I know that some have said the price for the ER Doc to look at your kids ear they get to charge $400), then the hospital part which might be in the $1000+!  That pays for the RN's and all the staff except for diagnostic parts.  You get X-rays or Lab work and it goes even higher with more bills.  You pay for the convince of one stop service.

Btw, some ER Docs are only getting collections of 50%, the hospital loves that we are seeing more patients and admitting more, they hate that more can't pay.

Health care isn't cheap.

Its at times like this that I remember how lucky I am to have access to the NHS. For all it's flaws it's better than this.

Plus you could probably also get some BUPA on top for a hell of a lot less than private insurance in the states. And we've got pretty much the worst public health service in the developed wolrd :awesome_for_real:

 It could have been worse. Last November i went to the ER with severe stomach pain, sent to sit in a back room for two hours, one ultra sound later i was told i might have gallstones and to see a family practice doctor on my own time, and given about 10 vicodin.
 
 $4,000 fucking dollars, and was uninsured at the time. I ended up putting off seeing a doctor until my insurance kicked in for fear they would have called it a pre existing condition and not cover the surgery.
 
 

Yeah, your line of thought has a key flaw. No price was given to him in advance. Not even the basic checkup cost.
If you're gonna compare it to any other service, you gotta play by the rules they play.

I don't want to know how much they charged my mother to sit in a chair with her first sciatica for six hours. After three or four hours they offered her a tylenol with codeine  :oh_i_see:

a) b) and c) are a load of shit.  Our healthcare system works best if a) you have a full time job and b) you don't use the emergency room for dental work.  How the hell does being educated or not have anything to do with it?

A. Standard ER visit is $1000. Period. It's there to keep you OUT. You're only supposed to go there for Life/Death situations. While you're in there complaining about your tooth, there's some poor sap outside having a heart attack.
B. Never go to any sort of Doctor over tooth pain. Dr's NEVER EVER treat teeth. They might give you pain killers but in truth they rarely ever work. Funny thing is, Ibuprofen works best because the pain is mostly caused by swelling around the nerve.
C. An abscess tooth is the most intense pain you'll ever go through. I've had broken bones, had teeth drilled without anesthesia, been ran over by a car, burned my arm from the elbow to the tips of my fingers and nothing even came close.
D. If you had a regular dentist you could have called him up and he would have come in on the weekend even at night to treat your tooth. Once in the chair he would have relieved the pain in under a minute. (ok, may 2 or 3)

I know this, my wife is a dental assistant and she has to go in on her days off all the time to treat morons that haven't had their teeth check in the past 15years, are about to get on a flight to the Bahamas and suddenly realize they have an abscess tooth and maybe they should get that fixed before leaving the country. In many cases the patients are shocked to find out they actually need to have 3 or 4 teeth pulled because they've neglected them so long. She has stories of pulling 1 tooth and having the teeth adjacent to it just fall right out along with it.

Oh yea, and after you left, your dentist was laughing with his assistant about your ER bill. Then she went home, told her husband and he laughed to.  :awesome_for_real:

Let me give you the quote I got that from:


I happen to agree with him.

dude... teeth are not healthcare. They're teeth. He could have pull the tooth at home if he really wanted to. They did it for like 10,000 years until recently.

They had children at home too. And if healthcare costs keep spiraling up, we'll go back to those ways just to be able to feed the little crumbsnatcher.

I will find your tombstone and carve that sentence as your epitaph.

It was the beginning to a Haiku

Teeth are not healthcare
I dun care bout your grammars
Grammar nazzi's suck

I don't think you really appreciate the situation of what an abscessed tooth is. Lets just say its a fucking emergency. Justifying a 1300 dollar price to have an ER doctor look at me for about 2 minutes is moronic. Yes a standard ER visit is 1,000 brilliant deduction yet i somehow find the justification "itz ta keeps ya out!" particularly insightful nor accurate.


While i find your point by point analysis amusing. You just recommended Ibuprofen for a fucking abscess tooth...jesus fuck  :awesome_for_real:

You obviously have no conception of the degree of severity of the situation. My face was swollen to an amazing degree. I had blackish coloration around my eyes. I was in mind numbingly pain. No amount of normal physical damage could cause such distress.  Unless Ibuprofen somehow reduces the pressure caused by pus and other fluids trapped inside your root structure/jaw bone. Also truthfully the pain killers worked just fucking amazing. So pretty much everything beyond "never goto doctor for teeth" is just blatantly stupid.

I did not go to the emergency room to receive dental work. I went to the ER because i was experiencing pain beyond my wildest nightmares and my face was a swelling horror.


This point seems at contrast with your "take some Ibuprofen it works wonders".


I have a regular dentist, I receive a checkup every 6 months and resolve all complications as soon as they are diagnosed. This event occurred at around 2AM Saturday morning. I could not get seen by any dentist until Sunday. I had an abscess tooth due to "trauma" I had somehow "cracked" the tooth but not to a degree that i was aware of an issue until it became infected.

It had absolutely nothing to do with neglect. And having a regular dentist did not solve the issue.

I managed an abscess tooth, seriously infected too, for a couple of weeks (the antibiotics had to work before they would even operate). I took extra strength tylenol. The last few days I did take a few vicodin, however.

You managed a couple of weeks with seizure inducing pain and a grotesquely swollen blue/black face?

You are a beast.

Im sure abscesses come in a wide variety of degrees of pain. I can confidently say we were not experiencing the same thing.

There are things called "Urgent Care Centers".  They can deal with just about anything an ER would without sending you to a different part of the hospital (and can usually admit you to one without the huge costs of going in through the ER.  They cost about 20-25% as much.  However, if you don't have insurance, they want cash up front.  Some states, they can also run a private practice shell and be your PCP, which I did in Virginia.  Knowing you can see a doctor at 2am while coughing up no more than a standard co-pay is re-assuring.

Depth of these facilities varies considerably from state to state.  In VA, they had everything an ER would have except the wait (I never waited longer than 30 minutes from when I walked in the door before I saw a doc, often my PCP here can't manage that when I have an appointment, which isn't unusual in most GP practices).  In TN, the one I used was quite a bit more stripped down and generally only had LPN's at night, but it was about 200 yards from a hospital with a full trauma center.  It would take a major disaster before ambulances would bring them patients, so it's unlikely you'll get bumped for an MVA while waiting for a doctor's two minutes (they also spent considerably more time with me, about the same as I would have expected from my normal PCP).

The bad news is that you'll almost never find them in towns under 250K, and the doctors tend to be even younger and more foreign than is normal in an ER.  One guy, I had to ask him to get a nurse or assistant to act as translator, I only got about every third word through what I *think* was an Argentinian accent (I've only heard that one a few times, so I'm not sure).

--Dave

Shoulda just downed most of a bottle of bourbon.

There are "Urgent Care Centers" or their equivalent around here. Before just deciding to fuck it and pay a normal dentist cash out of pocket i looked into all kinds community type deal/places just to established a regular dentist/doctor for checkups. But since I 1. Had no form of insurance and 2. Was not poor so could not receive any kind of financial assistance they completely denied me attempting to schedule an appointment.

I clearly explained that i would be willing to pay whatever sum of money they required before receiving service and they STILL said they would not. They said if i had a medical/dental emergency i could come in and wait to be seen if no other patients were present they would deal with me. What I am assuming is that once I get in a doctor/dentist that from that point onward they are forced to give me whatever treatment that i require. And since i had no insurance they were not even willing to let me in even with an offer of prepayment. I really couldn't figure out a motivation for their behavior.


I wish i could explain the level of pain. So far beyond weed,alcohol,aspirin. So intense it was not even localized to the tooth in question. I was pacing around like a wild animal literally moving around in an attempt to make the pain less intense.Removing an arm with an Axe would not be as painful. It wouldn't even be close.

You suddenly woke up one morning in this condition? Remember, that seems to have been the whole premise to the visit to the ER. That it was sudden and urgent. Mine took a few days to develope. Sure, there are different sorts of abscess teeth, but I sorta doubt that any variety sprout overnight.

My excuse was that I was out of state at a wedding when it emerged. I kept from going homicidal through extra strength tylenol and booze. By the time I got back, the infection was so engrained that the anaesthetic couldn't get to the roots of the tooth due to the skin's inflamation and the puss. I had to go for another week on antibiotics to get the swelling down.

Don't get me wrong, it was probably some of the worst pain I've ever been in, next to a cracked rib and the removal of an ingrown toenail w/o anaesthetic (1970s, Spain. in Spain, El Caudillo Cures You).

I guess its just suggests that there's more to the story than suddenly awakening with a sudden full blown abscess.

Tylenol and alcohol, worst pain killer combination ever.

I agree with Gryeyes, if the pain is bad you are going to want it taken care of immediately.  Plus, I doubt that anyone in such extreme pain is going to be thinking rationally about how much it will cost to make the pain go away.

As for Virginia and Urgent Care facilities, god I miss those.  We had one in Reston, Access, that had a better setup than the hospital next door.  Fully loaded with a helicopter pad attached to take people to a specialized hospital if the patient needed attention above and beyond what they could provide.  Very short wait times and they were open 24 hours a day.  They have since been acquired by a group that has taken the service in to the shitter, but the concept should really be expanded nationally and in to Canada.

I woke up at around 11PM with some moderate pain in my face/tooth area. I could not really pinpoint the pain specifically but noticed with my tongue a slight "bump" on my gum line that was pretty sensitive. . I drank some water then went back to sleep. In about 1 hour the pain intensified by 1,000 times making sleep impossible and the swelling in my mouth/ face started to get extremely bad. At this point i was in pain so severe i could barely think. I am far from a puss this was a type of pain beyond any comparisons. The pain was so bad i had to call and wake up my sister to drive for fear of me crashing. It was just unrelenting pain the only thing i could do that would lessen the pain at all was swish freezing cold water on the tooth. And even all that seemed to do was short circuit the pain for about 20 seconds.

I had already looked up my symptoms so i was aware of what was going on and what was needed to remedy the situation. As well as the possible complications (death is a possibility) especially with the extreme swelling in my face. I knew the only remedy a hospital would offer was pain prescription and anti-biotics. But there was simply no dealing with the pain for any sort of delaying the process.

I lead a fairly active life style and im guessing i took a knock to the face while boxing or riding dirt bikes weeks or even months previously (I had not seen a doctor in probably 3-4 months). An infection set in and was completely symptomless until the day of doom. The dentists said the infection appeared to have been around for awhile. I also had to wait i believe around 5 days for a course of anti-biotics.

Around here, the UCCs are /requiring/ you to designate them as PCPs or they won't see you. Basically everybody is swamped and nobody wants any more business.

Healthcare needs a reboot. Socialize, please.

I'm fucked for normal healthcare, but I've got an amazing dentist and oral surgeon on my team.

The NY governor and mayor of NYC tried to do this. The hospital lobbyists killed it. DOA. Screamed to everyone who would listen...."They are going to destroy healthcare!!!!!"

We have at least two in town, which is in NY. Maybe it's different in the city. These aren't some high-tech facility, just office space with a waiting room and a couple exams rooms. I used to use them for "get out of work free" cards, aka I've got the flu and work wants a note. Since they put in the thing about making them PCP or they won't see you, I just show up at work sick, fuck 'em if I'll pay out my ass just to get a note to point out the obvious.

I'm so glad I don't have to go through this kind of thing.
I'll take our socialized health care any day of the week over the medical cost horror stories I hear from the U.S.

There's a Mr. Darwin outside to see you.  He says he's sorry he's late.

I've been told Kidney Stones are worse. I've had a stone before, but never a tooth problem, so I'm not sure.

The ER was shocked that I was still cogent and able to walk upright when I came in.

PS: Morphine is GREAT.  :awesome_for_real:

post deleted

I've passed two small stones over the past five years (I've since learned to drink LOTS more water).  It is by far the most excruciating pain I've had in my life.  Starts as back/side pain and evolves into OMFG I'm dying kinda pain.  As in, can't even call into work and tell them I won't be there kinda pain. 

My dad suffers from Gall stones, as in once every couple of years it seems, which does not bode well genetically and I'm really hoping that it's not that trait I get from him. On a more :why_so_serious: note, back when he was growing up in Donegal the treatment for gall and kidney stones was taking a trip in the 'rattler' (ambulance with crappy suspension) to Dublin and back (approx 2-3 hours each way) on shitty uneven roads. They then gave you a few pints of Guinness and hopefully you passed the stones.

The best I could describe it was being stabbed in the kidney with a dull rod, having the pain radiate around my side in a very distinct line, hits the middle of my abdomen, and then shoots straight down into my groin.

I apparently was suffering from it for 3 days and didn't even know it. Up until the Saturday morning when I went to the ER, I thought I was having a urinary tract infection or something. It's extremely uncomfortable feeling like you have to urinate constantly...and then somehow not having to.