Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Holy crap....

A while back, my friend Kerry had her second baby, and she gave birth in an unplanned home birth. Shortly thereafter, she rode the ambulance with the baby to the hospital for follow-up stuff and...all the stuff they do with newborns and whatnot.

Kerry got billed for the two-mile ride $978. Ouch. (That's $.18 a foot.) I've long known that ambulance rides are a pretty stunning racket these days; we got a whopper of a bill for our two ambulance experiences, and we noticed that while the EMTs who drive and staff the ambulances are terrific people, their billing departments are staffed by ghouls and parasites. Not only do they get that bill into your hands nice and quick, they also turn the bill over to collections even nicer and quicker.

But what gets me about Kerry's story isn't the amount she was billed. It's that they billed the baby too. Come on, now.

1 comment:

Kerry said...

I KNOW, RIGHT??!

Thanks for sharing my outrage. I am still furious about it. But, really, it's my kid's fault for rushing his entrance, so it's coming out of his college fund.