Had an bike accident, this patient in US was forced to pay huge bills with the total of USD 20,243

News24xx.com - After a bicycle accident last year, an ambulance took Nina Dang to the emergency room at a public hospital in San Francisco. A few months later, the bill arrived: USD 20,243. The issue regarding the high medical costs in the United States (US) over the past year is being reviewed by the Vox site. Vox coverage triggered weeks of national debate.

At this time the hospital finally agreed to reduce the bill to USD 200, Vox reported on Thursday, January 24th 2019. The story illustrates the complexity of the American health system, the tangled network of public and private hospitals, the ambiguity of local and federal regulations, the practice of insurance that pays coverage differently if hospitals are "partners" or "not partners", even though health care reform has been ratified during Barack Obama's presidency.

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Patients must constantly find out whether their insurance will cover certain procedures, or if they can see a particular doctor or be treated in a particular hospital according to their scope. Coverage is often incomplete, and patients are left to guess what amount they will pay in the end.

In Dang's case, her insurance only covered a small portion of the bill from the emergency room, around USD 3,800 of a total of USD 24,000.The case happened because the insurance company did not have a insurance contract with the hospital, named Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, after the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, donated there.

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