Every year in the U.S., more than half a million families declare bankruptcy due to horrendoushigh medical bills. Because, for example, just getting a sick person to the hospital can cost up to half a million dollars! We present the absurdly high bills that Americans receive. And this is despite the law that a year ago was supposed to eliminate the phenomenon of shockingly high invoices.

No country spends as much on health care as the US. In 2021, Americans' spending on medical treatment increased by 2.7% and reached the astronomical sum of $4.3 trillion! That's $12,000 914 per American! Although it should be noted that this average is de facto higher, because as many as 29 million Americans in 2019 had no insurance policy at all and the lion's share of them did not pay for treatment.

The world's largest economy spends as much as 18.3% of its GDP on health care - a monstrous amount. Almost 2 times more than the average for more than 40 of the world's most developed countries - the OECD countries. Countries in this group on average spend 9.7% of GDP on health care (even before the pandemic, only 8.8% in 2019).

100 million Americans with medical debt!

Medical treatment costs salaciously in the US. So salubrious, in fact, that every year as many as 56 million Americans incur debts for it, or are charged such debts by health facilities. Of these, some 11 million take out so-called "instant loans" - high-interest loans (up to nearly 30%) to pay off charges on their credit cards. According to Kaiser Health News, a multitude of some 100 million Americans currently have medical debts - that's nearly one in three US residents.

Millions of them have to cut back on food in order to have enough to pay for such a loan installment. According to a study that KHN and NPR did, more than half of Americans have had such a medical loan/debt in the past five years.

Not surprisingly, the No. 1 reason for individual bankruptcies in the U.S. is precisely medical expenses - they account for as much as 2/3 of all bankruptcies.

In recent years they are announced by... 530 thousand families per year on average! But in crisis years (e.g. 2009), this number exceeded even 830 thousand. Between 2006 and the end of 2021, individual bankruptcy was granted by the courts to as many as 15.3 million Americans! What leads to them? The American media is full of descriptions of the outrageously high, even cosmic bills that patients receive. Often these unjustifiably large sums are reduced or even canceled as a result of patient lawyers or media coverage of the case. In the media, lawyers also advise on what to do and how to do it, so that either medical providers or insurers do not loot citizens.

We describe more than a dozen absurdly high bills Americans have received for health care services, mostly in 2021 and 2022.

$489,000 for air ambulance service

Sean Deines lost his job as a bartender in the spring of 2020 - a pandemic had broken out. He went to visit his father in the desolate Wyoming countryside. He became unwell. He was taken to a hospital in Casper, and from there they transported him by helicopter to the University of Colorado Hospital. There, the initial diagnosis was confirmed: acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a fast-growing blood cancer. Sean decided to return to North Carolina where he would have family care and where his insurer's main facility operates. Angel MedFlight announced that they would accept the insurer's rates and the patient would not have to pay a surcharge. So Sean flew with a nurse giving him oxygen on board. The hospital treated him for a month, and when he got well, he got the bill. And he felt bad again. Very bad: $489,000 to pay for a flight of approx. 2.2 thousand kilometers. This also included about $70 thousand for a short stretch by ordinary ambulance - from the airport to a nearby hospital.

The rates were horrendously high. As it later turned out, the ride from the airport to the hospital was 30 times more expensive than the standard for this route. More significantly, it turned out that Angel MedFlight made the flight before it received confirmation of payment from Blue Cross' insurer. In turn, this one, after the flight had already been made, did not agree to the payment, deciding that it was not medically necessary. And this despite the fact that the previous flight - from Casper to Colorado - the company had agreed to pay without discussion, even though the patient's condition was better then. Both companies wanted Deines to pay for it. When the media - Kaiser Health News - began to inquire about the matter, the bills suddenly "evaporated." Both companies apologized to the patient and promised that he would not be charged.

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The full text is available free of charge: HERE.