Rochdale Village Health

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“I never truly understood how much healthcare in the US costs until I got appendicitis in October,” wrote Reddit user zcypher, identifying himself as “a 20 year old guy.”

He posted the hospital bill to Reddit after he was shocked by the price. (See more images below):

Appendectomy Reddit – top of bill
zcypher / Reddit
Here’s the cost break down from his stay, which included:
$16,000 for the actual surgery.
$7,501 for two hours in the recovery room.
$4,878 for one night’s stay.
$4,562 for anesthesia.
His total charges came to $55,029.31, and even though insurance covered most of that, he was still sacked with $11,119.53 to come up with on his own.

While there’s no way to verify the experience of a random Redditor, his experience of major sticker shock after a trip to the hospital is not unique.

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Taken from Huffingtonpost.com, click here for original post

On World AIDS Day, it helps to know the facts — and know your status.

We’ve teamed up with Walgreens to show you how testing and treatment has dramatically improved the lives of those living with HIV/AIDS worldwide.

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By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

OCTOBER 12, 2013

OAKLAND, Calif. — The kitchen counter in the home of the Hayes family is scattered with the inhalers, sprays and bottles of pills that have allowed Hannah, 13, and her sister, Abby, 10, to excel at dance and gymnastics despite a horrific pollen season that has set off asthma attacks, leaving the girls struggling to breathe.

Asthma — the most common chronic disease that affects Americans of all ages, about 40 million people — can usually be well controlled with drugs. But being able to afford prescription medications in the United States often requires top-notch insurance or plenty of disposable income, and time to hunt for deals and bargains.

The arsenal of medicines in the Hayeses’ kitchen helps explain why. Pulmicort, a steroid inhaler, generally retails for over $175 in the United States, while pharmacists in Britain buy the identical product for about $20 and dispense it free of charge to asthma patients. Albuterol, one of the oldest asthma medicines, typically costs $50 to $100 per inhaler in the United States, but it was less than $15 a decade ago, before it was repatented.

“The one that really blew my mind was the nasal spray,” said Robin Levi, Hannah and Abby’s mother, referring to her $80 co-payment for Rhinocort Aqua, a prescription drug that was selling for more than $250 a month in Oakland pharmacies last year but costs under $7 in Europe, where it is available over the counter.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts the annual cost of asthma in the United States at more than $56 billion, including millions of potentially avoidable hospital visits and more than 3,300 deaths, many involving patients who skimped on medicines or did without.

“The thing is that asthma is so fixable,” said Dr. Elaine Davenport, who works in Oakland’s Breathmobile, a mobile asthma clinic whose patients often cannot afford high prescription costs. “All people need is medicine and education.”

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By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG
October 13, 2013

The dentist set to work, tapping and probing, then put down his tools and delivered the news. His patient, Patricia Gannon, needed a partial denture. The cost: more than $5,700.

Ms. Gannon, 78, was staggered. She said she could not afford it. And her insurance would pay only a small portion. But she was barely out of the chair, her mouth still sore, when her dentist’s office held out a solution: a special line of credit to help cover her bill. Before she knew it, Ms. Gannon recalled, the office manager was taking down her financial details.

But what seemed like the perfect answer — seemed, in fact, like just what the doctor ordered — has turned into a quagmire. Her new loan ensured that the dentist, Dr. Dan A. Knellinger, would be paid in full upfront. But for Ms. Gannon, the price was steep: an annual interest rate of about 23 percent, with a 33 percent penalty rate kicking in if she missed a payment.

She said that Dr. Knellinger’s office subsequently suggested another form of financing, a medical credit card, to pay for more work. Now, her minimum monthly dental bill, roughly $214 all told, is eating up a third of her Social Security check. If she is late, she faces a penalty of about $50.

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Best defense: Maintain healthy diet, normal weight, one expert says

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

FRIDAY, Sept. 27 (HealthDay News) — People with type 2 diabetes have a heightened risk of developing breast and colon cancer, and they’re also more likely than others to die of these diseases, Dutch researchers say.

Their conclusions are based on a review of 20 previous studies involving almost 2 million people. Overall, they found a 23 percent increased risk of developing breast cancer and a 38 percent increased risk of dying from it among people with type 2 diabetes. The data also showed a 26 percent greater risk of developing colon cancer and a 30 percent higher risk of dying from that malignancy.

“The evidence is getting quite strong that there is an association between diabetes and cancer,” said lead researcher Kirstin De Bruijn, a doctoral student in the surgery department at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam. “We think concern is warranted.”

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New warnings will appear on the tops of bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol sold in the U.S. beginning in October. The over-the-counter drug contains acetaminophen, which, taken in high doses, can lead to complications and even death.

 
WASHINGTON — Bottles of Tylenol sold in the U.S. will soon bear red warnings alerting users to the potentially fatal risks of taking too much of the popular pain reliever.

The unusual step, disclosed by the company that makes Tylenol, comes amid a growing number of lawsuits and pressure from the federal government that could have widespread ramifications for a medicine taken by millions of people every day.

Johnson & Johnson says the warning will appear on the cap of new bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol sold in the U.S. starting in October and on most other Tylenol bottles in coming months. The warning will make it explicitly clear that the over-the-counter drug contains acetaminophen, a pain-relieving ingredient that’s the nation’s leading cause of sudden liver failure.

“We’re always looking for ways to better communicate information to patients and consumers,” says Dr. Edwin Kuffner, vice president of McNeil Consumer Healthcare, the Johnson & Johnson unit that makes Tylenol.

Overdoses from acetaminophen send 55,000 to 80,000 people to the emergency room in the U.S. each year and kill at least 500, according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration.

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WARSAW, Ind. — Michael Shopenn’s artificial hip was made by a company based in this remote town, a global center of joint manufacturing. But he had to fly to Europe to have it installed.

Mr. Shopenn, 67, an architectural photographer and avid snowboarder, had been in such pain from arthritis that he could not stand long enough to make coffee, let alone work. He had health insurance, but it would not cover a joint replacement because his degenerative disease was related to an old sports injury, thus considered a pre-existing condition.

Desperate to find an affordable solution, he reached out to a sailing buddy with friends at a medical device manufacturer, which arranged to provide his local hospital with an implant at what was described as the “list price” of $13,000, with no markup. But when the hospital’s finance office estimated that the hospital charges would run another $65,000, not including the surgeon’s fee, he knew he had to think outside the box, and outside the country.

“That was a third of my savings at the time,” Mr. Shopenn said recently from the living room of his condo in Boulder, Colo. “It wasn’t happening.”

“Very leery” of going to a developing country like India or Thailand, which both draw so-called medical tourists, he ultimately chose to have his hip replaced in 2007 at a private hospital outside Brussels for $13,660. That price included not only a hip joint, made by Warsaw-based Zimmer Holdings, but also all doctors’ fees, operating room charges, crutches, medicine, a hospital room for five days, a week in rehab and a round-trip ticket from America.

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By Winnie Hu

The online banter was too steamy to ignore.

Gregory Johnson, center, looked for videos and information about H.I.V. awareness during a meeting in the Bronx. Mr. Johnson is part of a project that uses social media to reach out to gay and bisexual men.

Gregory Johnson, a soft-spoken young man using the screen name “Adonis,” talked up sex to several hundred of his closest Facebook friends this spring. Once he had their attention, he sent a racy snapshot of two square wrappers tucked into his underwear along with a plea: Why not use a condom?

It was only a matter of time before the social media that keeps friends and family connected and amused was pressed into public service. Just as antismoking ads have come to saturate the airwaves, a flurry of personalized messages promoting H.I.V. testing and protected sex have popped up on thousands of smartphones, iPads and laptops in recent months.

The online campaign is the work of an unusual health project in the Bronx, which seeks to harness social media to educate gay and bisexual men about the risks of contracting H.I.V. and AIDS. The project, called “theSEXword,” recruited seven men and one woman who is transgender to build an online forum for sharing safe-sex messages with people who would never bother to pick up a brochure. It was financed with $25,000 from the Center for AIDS Research, a joint program of Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.

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Originally published: June 5, 2013 6:36 PM
Updated: June 5, 2013 10:06 PM
By BART JONES bart.jones@newsday.com

Community residents and civic leaders are protesting the pending sale — and possible demolition — of a magnificent “Great Gatsby”-era mansion where a future pope once stayed.

The sale of St. Ignatius Retreat House on Nassau County’s Gold Coast is expected to close in late July, with housing developers planning to subdivide the 33-acre site, according to the Jesuit priests selling the property.

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By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

At North Shore University Hospital on Long Island, motion sensors, like those used for burglar alarms, go off every time someone enters an intensive care room. The sensor triggers a video camera, which transmits its images halfway around the world to India, where workers are checking to see if doctors and nurses are performing a critical procedure: washing their hands.

This Big Brother-ish approach is one of a panoply of efforts to promote a basic tenet of infection prevention, hand-washing, or as it is more clinically known in the hospital industry, hand-hygiene. With drug-resistant superbugs on the rise, according to a recent report by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and with hospital-acquired infections costing $30 billion and leading to nearly 100,000 patient deaths a year, hospitals are willing to try almost anything to reduce the risk of transmission.

Studies have shown that without encouragement, hospital workers wash their hands as little as 30 percent of the time that they interact with patients. So in addition to the video snooping, hospitals across the country are training hand-washing coaches, handing out rewards like free pizza and coffee coupons, and admonishing with “red cards.” They are using radio-frequency ID chips that note when a doctor has passed by a sink, and undercover monitors, who blend in with the other white coats, to watch whether their colleagues are washing their hands for the requisite 15 seconds, as long as it takes to sing the “Happy Birthday” song.

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