“Cheap”, I have watched them stick a 99 cent pregnancy test into my urine then turn around and charge my insurance company $300 for it.
I’ve had a bilateral salpingectomy done, I don’t have fallopian tubes. My eggs get absorbed into my body. They still insist even though last time I checked only 4 pregnancies have ever occurred after that surgery were from left over pieces of fallopian tube. My tubes were fully removed. I’m going to start bringing my glossy hi res photos of my tubes post op that my surgeon gave me (since they had to send them to pathology which meant I couldn’t keep them) with me to procedures so they maybe stop scamming my insurance company into paying hundreds of dollars for an unnecessary and very cheap test.
I might be butting in here, but many people have to pay full (negotiated) price on these tests until they hit their deductible. And even if insurance is covering 100% of the costs, we should still care if wasteful things are being done because it drives up the cost for everyone else and contributes to our horrible system.
That said, I know some patients lie and some are idiots and a lot of medical professionals are jaded (and a lot lie or are also idiots), so it's a complicated line to walk.
And that sucks and insurance is evil. But it’s not wasteful to do a fast and simple and noninvasive test that knocks out some possibilities, plural, for what’s going on. I can see a good argument for not putting everyone in a full body MRI for cancer prevention, but the dipstick hcg is so deeply not a waste of anything.
It’s literally a waste of $299. And my time. And the healthcare workers time. And I have bodily autonomy up until the point where I’ve given a healthcare worker a reason that I shouldn’t for a time, and this isn’t that time.
Isn't it possible for the health insurance to not cover the amount in full and then bill you for the difference? I'm sure it would end up being a line item among a million other things, but still.
Yes. Insurance is evil. The upreg is still a good idea. But if the argument is “the hospitals are charging my insurance too much”, then, like, ok? I hate insurance companies! Fuck em!
Well it happening once is nbd. But when it happens thousands of times it raises costs (legitimately or à la snickering robber baron) for everyone else.
I agree insurance is evil, but I promise you even ten thousand pregnancy tests a day more would not result in a legitimate insurance rate spike. They are so unbelievably cheap. It is literally only greed that makes them expensive and that’s a greed problem and not a problem with the test.
Yes. But the greed is a problem and it must be taken into account. I agree it’s dirt cheap to conduct the test… ideally but the greed is still a problem.
Not to mention time is a resource as well. Five minutes taking the test is five minutes better spent elsewhere.
Because we force people to take a lot of unnecessary tests, if you only view them after they result. We don’t know it’s not necessary until it proves it’s not necessary.
If the argument is: it costs too much! I agree WHOLEHEARTEDLY, but that’s a system problem and not one I can do anything about. If the argument is: I don’t NEED it, you don’t know that. Your doctor doesn’t know that. I don’t know that. It’s a good idea to do a fast, simple, noninvasive test that narrows down our options for what’s going on.
Having access to a toy in the hospital doesn't mean it has to be used.
The majority of all medical tests in the United States are wholly unnecessary and are known to be such from the jump. We also do entirely too much treatment of the monitor and not enough treatment of the patient.
I've been working in emergency medicine for 6 years, and I've seen it happen. I've taken patients having a blood sugar emergency to the ED with a blood sugar of 500, instead of giving my patient a bolus of insulin and discharging them the patient was given an unnecessary ($1500) MRI to make sure their symptoms entirely explainable by known medical history wasn't a stroke. Their symptoms weren't stroke-like in presentation either.
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that it was a Medicaid patient they wouldn't have been able to bill as much for otherwise.
Man, I’ll be real, I’d be annoyed, but I’ll never be mad at a hospital wanting to do MORE tests rather than less. I’ve seen them discharge my mom and had to physically hold her up as she nearly collapsed in the parking lot because they didn’t do the tests they needed to do to properly diagnose the infection she had
The sheer unbridled confidence of “it’s probably nothing serious” is great up until the one time you’re wrong
That's not what I'm talking about. Tests are necessary when they're indicated, your mom had indications for testing that were ignored (which is negligence). I'm talking about blanket policies to mandate additional testing for every single patient (and passing the costs off to the patients because this is America) simply so the hospital can avoid liability that doesn't actually exist if they give their staff livable working conditions.
Alright, fair, but there are like two or three nested and entangled problems here, and the one you’re talking about is a symptom of the others
The for-profit, private insurance healthcare system in America, and the working conditions for staff caused by that system, those are the root causes of the thing, and those are the ones I’d complain about before I complained about the hospital’s policy on blanket tests, y’know?
And man, again, speaking purely from personal experience and how my brain works: even with the cost, I’d rather have the needless test. But I’m willing to accept that’s a me thing
(Alternative joke post: a man who orders an MRI on every senior is a fool every day but one)
I'm necroposting because the nurse on the other branch of this threat really pissed me off with their bullcrap. But another aspect of it that I didn't address with you is that mandatory tests in American healthcare (especially for things like pregnancy tests) are rooted in a presumption that our patients are lying to us about everything all the time.
But a care provider who has actually spent the time to learn how to interact with other human beings is usually able to parse that out, and oftentimes taking a history properly and getting a full list of signs and symptoms for current presentation reveals the problem without peeing on a stick.
When you're a patient being denied necessary treatment to receive unnecessary tests they're the exact same thing. But I guess a dipstick like you would wanna advocate for other dipsticks.
A pandemic is a public health crisis and an infectious disease. You're not gonna catch pregnant by working on a patient who hasn't had a pregnancy test and has had all that shit scooped out
And you’re in no way harmed by peeing. If the argument is you’re harmed bc it’s pricey, then that’s insurance and greed, not the test. This is a noninvasive, non harmful test that gives us good information and is required to proceed with certain treatment plans like surgeries. I will absolutely argue against tests that carry a risk of harm and are pretty superfluous, and I do get in it with my MDs about their “everyone gets an MRI” policy. But there’s just no coherent argument that a upreg causes patient harm in any way, shape, or form outside of every single thing we do in this system being patient harm because none of it is promised to be useful or helpful and it’s all extremely expensive.
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u/C_is_for_Cats Aug 01 '26
“Cheap”, I have watched them stick a 99 cent pregnancy test into my urine then turn around and charge my insurance company $300 for it.
I’ve had a bilateral salpingectomy done, I don’t have fallopian tubes. My eggs get absorbed into my body. They still insist even though last time I checked only 4 pregnancies have ever occurred after that surgery were from left over pieces of fallopian tube. My tubes were fully removed. I’m going to start bringing my glossy hi res photos of my tubes post op that my surgeon gave me (since they had to send them to pathology which meant I couldn’t keep them) with me to procedures so they maybe stop scamming my insurance company into paying hundreds of dollars for an unnecessary and very cheap test.