Two days before he was to marry in Colorado last April, Cameron Fischer had too much fun at his bachelor party, and woke up the next morning with a hideous hangover. The head pain and gut distress all day were miserable, he says – but nothing in comparison to the medical bill he got for rehydration at an emergency room.
The bill was initially $12,460 -- more than twice the cost of his wedding.
“Fischer had run into a sobering fact about America's health care system,” health reporter Markian Hawryluk, explains in his recounting of the episode this week. ”With few constraints on how emergency rooms set prices, hospital systems have jacked up rates and coded patient visits as being more complex than they would have previously, which increases the payments they receive from insurance plans.”
The result? “ER services have some of the fastest-growing prices in the health care system.”
In mid to late pregnancy, otherwise healthy women sometimes develop a condition known as preeclampsia. Though doctors still don’t know exactly why it occurs, the attendant high blood pressure and other complications can be serious or even fatal for the mom or baby.
As some in the U.S. who vape continue to get sick with severe and unexplained lung illness, state and federal health agencies are scrambling to find answers.
So far there have been 530 confirmed or probable cases in 38 states, including eight deaths. Most affected patients have come down with severe breathing troubles; many have been diagnosed with some form of pneumonia.
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