“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.
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.
Causes mental harm. I'm a trans woman, do I have to pee on a stick? Because for some reason nobody ever makes me pee on a stick, but my friend has to every time even though he has no uterus, no cervix, and no fallopian tubes.
You're letting your algorithm tell you how to think and using your algorithm as circular logic to defend it. Be better.
Edit: Your whole argument basically boils down to "I'm just following orders and you should listen to me because I've been ordered to do this".
Edit2: Btw this wasn't about the last word, this was about you being wrong and not being willing to admit it. (This next part is about the last word) But then, I've never known a nurse capable of admitting they were wrong. "Not my patient, I just got here, they were fine five minutes ago when I checked on them last".
Edit3: Y'all nurses love to pretend you have no power to change anything whenever it's convenient, but whenever y'all are getting screwed by the hospital there's a miraculous overnight change and suddenly you can do anything to fix the problem.
Edit4: also, yes the priceyness is absolutely just the result of corporate greed (even ignoring the dysphoria angle for why pregnancy testing everyone is dumb) but you have an obligation to your patients to provide the best care possible for their condition. Sometimes their primary condition is poverty, and by giving a test that you know is unreasonably expensive and also unnecessary in most cases then you're doing a disserve to your patients by worsening their primary conditions.
And finally, pregnancy tests just plainly aren't indicated in the majority of presentations. At best, a positive pregnancy test is the excuse you'll use to dismiss your patients symptoms as being "just caused by the pregnancy".
Florence Nightingale would be ashamed of modern nurses, and not just because of the racial integration.
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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.