
Here we are, about six months after I had my appendectomy, and it looks like (knock on wood) I’m finally through with all of it. Every now and then, I still have a bit of discomfort internally, but that’s virtually gone now. Yay! And at long last, my insurance paid its part of the bill.
How much was it? Well, if you don’t count the impact on my vacation plans and just look at it from a financial “How much was the appendectomy” standpoint, the grand total was . . . $200.
The bill I got from Scotland for the whole thing came to around $6,300. They told me at first that I wouldn’t have to worry about anything. The hospital was going to talk to my insurance, and they’d work it out together. In practice, the hospital sent me the bill, and I had to then pay it out of pocket and put in a claim with my insurance, who bounced it back to me because they wanted more information. The Scottish hospital told me that it didn’t have that kind of information. (They wanted everything broken out by how much each service cost, but Scotland just billed on a “how many days were you in the hospital?” basis.)
I sent that response back to my insurance, who pondered the new information for about a month, and then sent me a check for $6,100.
Two comments: first, I am very lucky to have as good of insurance as I do. There are a few reasons for this: I work in Maine, a state that tends to care about its citizens more than many other states), I work (indirectly) for the state, and the university is a union environment, so the workers have consistently advocated for themselves for decades.
Second, even with that good insurance, I needed to be on firm financial footing to be able to handle this. There are many who couldn’t just float a $6,000 for four months without needing to go into debt to do so. When I look at the charge the American side of things billed my insurance ($32,000+), and remember that didn’t even cover the initial appendectomy, it just reminds me how important it is that we try to bring medical costs under control here.
In any event, I’m grateful to be on the other side of this ordeal, and very grateful it didn’t have more of an impact on me, physically or financially, than it did.