You Should Know

It still boggles my mind that Americans believe this is normal.

Where I live, they refuse to give me an invoice at all...

YSK This is only relevant for the USA.

YSK you don't get a medical bill in a civilised country.

https://dollarfor.org/

I found this non-profit from the Pluralistic blog. It's there to help you find discounts that hospitals are obligated to give some patients, but aren't easily found.

Here's the post it came from.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/22/optimized-for-unoptimizability/

Amerikkka moment...

We live in Denmark. My wife lost her job at a senior home due to stress. 3 years later, breast cancer diagnosis followed by a quick operation. Shes waiting for the radiation sessions now. In the US, we would probably have gone bankrupt. Sorry for you guys.

Completely opposite to the finnish experience.

When I broke my ulna and dislocated my wrist, I took an ambulance ride to the hospital, got three xrays, a cast, and two doses of fentanyl.

Told to return the next morning for post-cast xrays of the damage, by the end of that I was scheduled for surgery 8 days later. Sent home with a prescription for some non-opioid painkillers. Picked those up for around 20 euros.

Received four hours of hand surgery. Over a dozen titanium screws and a titanium plate put in. Given three pills of an opioid based painkiller for sleeping through the worst of the post-surgery pain. And another prescription for more non-opioids.

Weeks later, removal of the surgery bandages and stitches. Xrays of how the bone was healing, followed by a consultation with a hand surgeon, and then a physical therapist on recovering motion in the wrist and fingers.

Months later one more round of xrays, and two more consultations with the physical therapist, and some follow-up with a hand surgeon due to the therapist noticing a lack of motion in my thumb, resulting in the discovery of some nerve-damage from the surgery (which I thankfully ended up recovering from).

By the end, I was sure I would max out the healthcare billing limit. This was the most expensive recovery from an injury I'd ever suffered. Finnish public health care is only allowed to bill you up to a maximum yearly amount, so as to never overload any one individual with debt. But it would still be a lot for me.

When I finally got an un-itemized bill, I was sure it was only the first of many.

Nope. It was the total. 87 euros and 40 cents.

My friend recently got their routine blood draw that they get yearly. This time it was over $2000. Usually less than $50. They've called the billing department several times and been hung up on each time when asking for an itemized bill. The system is working as intended and needs to be dismantled

Onces you get the itemized bill you should just not pay that too lol

Funny really. I've never recieved an itemised bill from a hospital visit.

#usacentricpost

I will simply continue to not use healthcare unless I think I'm actually dying.

There are hundreds of movies about US soldiers being heroes by killing their enemies

How many movies are there about US citizens being fucked over by hospitals and insurance for more decades than I've been alive? I don't know of any.

This really encapsulates the US in two paragraphs

It's funny how the errors never work in your favor.

Each error should be punishable by a 100x fine. I bet those pesky little extra charges would stop very quickly.

Maybe this was true in 1967 when the typing pool and the accountants had to coordinate to whip up a bill by hand, but the number that the computer spits out is literally a spreadsheet sum of all the line items.

“Itemized bill with CPT” (if it’s a hospital bill they mostly use HCPCS with Rev codes anyway, so ask for “with procedure codes”) is exactly what they send in on insurance claims, so they already have it. It’s not any extra work, no one reviews it and compares it to medical records; it’s literally generated and pulled directly from the medical records.

Unless you are at a small rural hospital that still uses dot matrix printers with the ribbon paper, it’s highly unlikely this will change anything for you. It costs them the extra paper.

So glad I got universal heath care

So what if my elective mri took 7 months? Atleast I don’t have medical debt!!!

You can also negotiate directly with your medical provider. Ask if they have Financial Assistance programs you can apply for. Nonprofit hospitals in the US are required by law to have these programs and provide you with information when requested, and it frequently results in having your medical debt reduced or forgiven.

Each time I’ve asked for an itemized bill for hospital visits it’s only made the price higher…

The games that hospitals and medical providers play with bills is unreal. My wife and I had to manage cancer treatment for one of our family members and the amount of incorrect bills, redundant bills and deluge of documents that were sent were from the hospital and various providers was fucking insane.

Little did they know that my wife is a machine when it comes to organizing and dissecting information. She would routinely crush those fuckers on the bills they were sending. They tried to bill for the same procedure FOUR times!

If the person getting the treatment had to handle all those bills while being incapacitated withe chemo and pain management they would have been screwed hard.

I do not have any hard evidence that all of the above was by design or by errors in the system but it sure seemed intentional.

If you receive a high medical bill, you should follow Luigi's example.

Yeah this doesn't really work anymore. In the past 2 years I've seen the hospital bills from 2 different hospitals.

Both hospitals issued an itemized bill automatically. We didn't have to ask for anything. My guess is hospitals know this "trick" now and just have better accounting. So they issue the itemized right away so.they don't have to deal with anyone calling