British NHS Doctor Reacts to American Medical Bills

if i'm paying that much for a hospital bed i wouldn't want to keep the bed like this [Music] i haven't done a collab in so long because i covered hello everybody and uh welcome back to a man who won't stop telling you that he's saying to the queen my name is evan edinger and uh this is ian hello ian what are you doing i'm a junior doctor in the nhs hell yeah so you are one of our heroes that we clap for and that pays your bills i wish i paid my bills so uh today i thought it'd be really interesting if i get ian on and i just talk to him about some hospital bills that we have in the states for some basic things and find out how much certain things should cost or how complex things are i feel like you've got quite a lot of experience yeah what was your shifts like this week i've had three long 12 hour days and two short days so dana just came off nights as well so uh and you don't have to do nights anymore yeah don't have to do any more nights at least for next year hell yeah i'm just curious about what the standard checkup entails timing well generally speaking um if you want like a full body checkup usually you go private for that okay something the nhs often offers really you're above a certain age so i think above maybe 60 or 70 is when they would do a checkup as standard but generally speaking yeah if you want just sort of check out for your own kind of well-being yeah peace of mind or whatever then you usually go private for that and that would cost you in the range of about 100 quid wow that's actually the same as the us then which is on average about 75 to 150 million um what i've no i mean i went for a checkup for my gp like four years ago and they were very strange about it so i guess that's probably why what would the costs be for having a baby well again like everything's free but uh what would it cost the hospital let's say you go to the hospital you squeeze it out in half an hour and there's no complications everything goes smoothly the hospital is gonna spend about one and a half grand maybe for that that's it um oh boy our c-section um so if it gets complicated you're looking at maybe doubling that and if it's a c-section you're maybe looking at maybe sort of three and a half to five grand um for that that's a more complicated delivery wow um but that's like what basically the way the nhs works is they get paid for things that they fix or things that they treat so they have to try and budget a way to to do that so that it comes up to a roughly amount that they get compensated for is this why they don't fix things that aren't broken yeah and it's why they maybe there's certain things that aren't sort of budgeted to fix or like certain conditions that don't like aren't treated under the nhs are there any sort of hidden fees though at all prescriptions in england i know supposedly the prescriptions yeah they cost about nine quid although depending on what medicine you get that can actually be a really good deal or um kind of shitty oh yeah so paracetamol yeah the parasite was a classic example no one wins nhs pays more money than it gets from that prescription and you also pay more money than what you would get paid for just in just in a sainsburys or whatever so never get paracetamol prescribed unless you're like can't walk is ultrasound very complex like is that no ultrasound is basically your your cheapest investigation that you can do is as a scan ultrasound is super cheap it costs about 20 50 quid to do an ultrasound scan that's pretty fair x-rays are again about 25 quid cts are about 100 mri's about 150. these all sound really manageable but you always have to pay to get it like reported and you've got to like slot it in and like for example if you do a scan overnight then it costs a bit more because you have to outsource the reporting as well and reporting a scan costs about 100 pounds to do overnight i mean this is making sense obviously it's all free yeah but the fact that it costs those amounts i'm like even if i had to pay that i wouldn't be as upset i suppose what i've got here is a specific bill on birth ultrasound is 897 dollars so like in hospital ultrasound scan is like the scan or in gp land as well it's like the scan you try and do first because it's like the quickest the cheapest and the easiest so i mean that isn't the cheapest uh the cheapest is audiology that's 215. i don't know what that means well that's just like an ear test i guess yeah testing the pregnant woman see if she's still hearing maybe when they're listening to the baby through the through the stuff yeah yeah they do do that like when you when they listen to the baby's heartbeat to make sure that it's not like in distress but that's just like yeah that's that's not that's 200 though you don't pay for that in the nhs it's just you just do it while you're there in the us the recovery room when you're having a baby is the it's not really a closed-off room that you get it's basically like when you're in the nhs and you get put in that like curtain triage triage how much do you think that costs knowing america probably like two grand a night or something 2.9 oh my god yeah just get your own hotel room for that much money but that's just the recovery room as well you have to remember that there's also the labor room which is five grand so just those two rooms is quite a lot also we're not even talking about the surgery obviously i mean in the in the nhs like you can't actually choose to have like a water birth or you know like a home birth you can choose to yeah yeah you and obviously you've got a plan for it and if you're sort of deemed more high-risk they might not let you do it is it cheaper to do oh this is the reason to have it complicated yeah i do know like for some postnatal kayla after you've given birth if you're not like a like a full uk citizen um then you do you're not like that's not covered by the nhs you have to pay half of that whoa whoa whoa whoa so if you were like what if i was an indefinite leave to remain resident though um i'm not sure about that but i know like people who are like on heroin asylum et cetera like if they they're giving birth is free but then the postnatal care they have to pay for half of that but again it's not that much it's like maybe they pay around max right like everything by postnatal care are you referring to the skin on skin contact um no that's which costs forty dollars just i just love that they could have just maybe included that silently in the in the bill yeah they go like no you must pay to touch your baby yeah it's like the ryanair of healthcare isn't it the ryanair of health yeah the entire cost by the way for this one was one thousand dollars for having a baby so it's like how do the poor have babies that's more than it costs to raise a baby or maybe maybe about the same i don't know it depends depends how uh my baby could eat your babies how much would anesthesia cost because in my opinion that would be really expensive because it knocks someone out you gotta do it right so i guess you know most women like i guess if they're giving their birth life they might have something called epidural which is there yeah they put a needle in your spine and sort of block all the pain from down below that's a bit of a pain to do i i don't have an exact coverage but um it's a bit it's tricky to get the needle in the right place so usually you'd get an anesthetist to do that so you'd pay them the wage of the anesthetist for that maybe half hour it takes them to do it and then you'd pay for the like the materials to do it and the drugs to do it but i guess it would it wouldn't cost more than about 200 pounds i guess oh yeah it's like 400 bucks for anesthesia but also drugs is 8.7 grand on this so the drugs are separate just for the drugs here's a story a patient comes in he was chopping some vegetables chopping a bit more than vegetables uh luckily not harming his yeah he didn't chop it too much he he didn't go down to the tendon it was a bit above that but he still had to go to the the er so skin grafts stitches for that how much how complex for just a cut was on the bill okay well i mean i mean he must have chopped it pretty bad if he needed his skin graft like he's like oh yeah peeled automatically trip to er you're looking at around 200 for the ambulance uh and around between 50 and 400 quid for for the a e 200 for the ambulance is pretty sexy um and then wait how much was any uh like between 50 to 400 pounds and average is about 100 quid uh what if it was at like night time that's just going to be a tiny bit more but like it's about the same and then i guess for the stitches well depends how bad the wound is if it's just like something that someone in a e can do we might just do it in ourselves so yeah in that case like your time plus the cost of the stitch would be like five ten pounds so if your time's worth five pounds the cost of the stitch i mean oh okay okay well i get paid like 12 pound an hour like and then a little bit of bonus per night so do you get free lunch no no maybe maybe like once a month i'll get like a few like bits of sandwiches on a platter but i get that late and it's just like the ones it's not like you get just ham yeah yeah yeah like yeah or egg and crest yeah no no those are gone oh i don't even like it i get like one of those small apples that no one likes you know the ones that like yeah oh the brownie ones uh so the doctor worked on this guy in the story for 45 minutes and the whole bill came out to 5.9 000 pounds for a little cut on his finger what's interesting was they had on the bill here uh tendon repair so they had to repair his tendon even though he in 45 minutes there wasn't any tendon error yeah i mean they definitely didn't replace tendons yeah oh wait i'm sorry it's 5.9 grand for the doctor's fees [Laughter] it was fourteen thousand dollars in total yeah so like if you've got it really badly cut if you really hurt the tendon and you had to go to theater well max you'd be maybe looking at a grand maybe you may be too grand if it was really complicated do people watch you in the theater like are there like junior doctors like looking over like yeah i mean usually there's like the the chief operator and then you'll have like a junior to help him um and then there'll be like the operating nurse who like gives you all the tools and there'll be like nurses yeah who are like doing all stuff in the background and there'll be an anaesthetist in the corner as well so yeah there's usually a fairly decent crowd there do you ever get tired of the smell of the hospital like how sanitized it is no not really i get tired of the smell when it's not sanitized well enough oh okay wow yeah like my house elderly care wards or like gastro awards definitely oh oh would you say there's a lot of people that go into a e that probably shouldn't be going there for things like alcohol so i mean alcohol is horrendously expensive for health in general like really you can if you think of it in the long term like if it messes you up so bad in the long run it costs and it's just tons of money but if you're just talking about like the acute episode uh let's say something like drunk hooligan comes in to any i'm sure there'll be a lot of that tonight it's coming home so like i said before any attendance usually costs about 50 to 400 pounds okay um so if they just need to sober up in a bed somewhere and then go home like a few hours later after getting a drip that would happen so the drip how much would the drip cost fiber a fiver i don't know why but i assume assume that if there's a bag of liquids going into my body that's gonna cost a lot of money like a bag of salt water like so you're saying a bag of saline costs five bucks i mean i'm guessing but yeah no two liters of saline cost seven hundred dollars but i swear i swear like there are services that you can pay for now where like you can get hangover cure whether it comes to your house and set up a drip so that's what's interesting is that if you do it at the hospital and it's late night 700 you can go to walmart and pick up a bag of saline for i think 16 yeah well exactly yeah there we go you know it's time and a place it's like if you get the uber eats delivery it's far away a little bit more money so you go to the hospital you really need this help where are you going to go walmart if they like if they really drink too much and they like need to stay in hospital then like obviously where you're staying overnight costs a bit more so that could easily end up reaching like about 500 kilograms how much do you think it cost for that one day for he came in at i think 8 p.m and he had to uh i don't think he stayed overnight but it was definitely five six hours what would the facility fee be to like use the facility um yeah well i mean like like i said if you if you go to any get treated there and get discharged i told you how much that cost oh yeah with a sound of that he's in there for longer than four hours so he'd get moved over to like the acute medical unit beyond that but just for like overnight until the next morning like hospital beds between like 240 per night 7 600 but then again the the excuse is well this is a late night if i'm paying that much for a hospital bed i want to keep the bed like this like while i'm recovering you know i want massages i want aromatherapy oh also what was interesting was that uh it also included a drug test which he did not consent to but was on the bill for 970 dollars and that was that just like a basic standard year in drug test yeah i i think it's like 20 quid like was i think the the guy had said he came into the place saying i'm not on any drugs except alcohol i'm just very very drunk and i need to like hydrate and they went let's test them anyway you could just drink some water yeah i think that he was far gone or something and he had a wedding the next day oh god yeah it was the bachelor party it turns out though his hospital bill cost more than the entire wedding which ends up being 12 460. absolutely insane that's like more expensive than like they probably spent in the movie hangover like oh my god yeah just for that bachelor party going to like thailand or whatever you could yeah that's insane you could literally go to thailand get treated there and come back for cheaper if you could survive that far but to be fair he did get insurance and so it brought the price down to 2 600 pretty nice heart attack obviously cardiac arrest i'm hoping i don't have any of those but hey basically the story is a medical i have a medical bill from a u.s high school teacher aged 44 suffered cardiac arrest and had to spend four days in the hospital and get two synergy stints stents okay do you know what a synergy stent is brand but yeah he got some cardiac stents okay how much do you think the two stents would have cost cardiac carbs are a little bit more expensive i guess the price gets driven up as well because not everyone makes it and the people who don't make it they increase the price for the people who do make it if you know what i mean capitalism and i guess most of the cost for cardiac arrests related emission comes from like your time in intensive care yeah so intensive care is a lot more expensive than a normal hospital bed it costs about two grand per night to keep some hospital intensive care that's good but that's because you've got like one-on-one staffing and you've got all the special equipment hooked up like it's a lot more inexpensive yeah um if you had a normal heart attack um and it wasn't that bad and you just like you know just got treated whatever maybe it costs like one and a half grand two grand um if you ended up intensive care needing cardio extensive stuff that could be anywhere from like four grand to ten grand so that actually makes sense now oh just for the nights in there well like no for everything like the oh you know the heart surgery the intensive care stay the treatments and like whatever well his his stents cost 19 000 each and he had two of them oh my god they charged you per stent yeah yeah yeah each dent was 19 grand uh but luckily he had really good insurance so after the heart attack he only had to pay a hundred and nine thousand dollars i think i'd have another heart attack yeah they would get a heart attack after having a heart attack especially like he's a teacher so he had good benefits but there's only so much you can really do there so this one's personal to me because as you know you helped me out last time i had to go to the hospital i remember that made a video i thought i had appendicitis i think it was gastro i think you probably just had a bit of wind or something that's right the amount of comments like this thinks he's got ass he just needed a font yeah i did need a fart it was a lot of bad farts i think it was just really intense gastro but i was told by two different nurses two different things so obviously i'm a bit confused what would it cost to get the appendicitis removed was it called an appendix yeah so appendicitis appendicitis is one of the quickest and cheapest surgeries you can do oh is that the thing with the pin hole so yeah you try and do it laparoscopically which is sort of pinhole surgery that's actually a bit more expensive than doing it open oh um because you've got you've got to use all the equipment and it takes a tiny bit longer but obviously it's less complications better for the patient and it's actually a little bit easier for the doctor as well because when it's open all the guts are kind of going around everywhere and it's a bit difficult to kind of i really hope they're not going around everywhere yeah yeah yeah the operation itself would take about half an hour to 40 minutes usually can be take an hour a bit longer if it's a bit complicated the equipment like all the laparoscopes and like you know stitches and stuff of course that would be about two three hundred pounds the time in the theater let's say half an hour to an hour you'd be spending about 500 to a grand on like paying all the stuff the room and you know that's like not just like the doctor that's like the surgeon anesthetist this sounds fair the assistant surgeon the nurse et cetera that's everything so in total maybe a grand grand and a half max but it could be a lot less like i feel like if the us didn't have health care like the nhs did but yet was that price i feel like people wouldn't be as uproared about it i mean obviously a thousand pounds is a lot of money but also compared to like 44 000 for an appendicitis removal well i think people should understand like what they're asking for costs because i don't get the itemized a lot of the time people go to like hospitals or inappropriately like they don't know actually how much they're costing like because that money ends up going back through the system and they're not paying for it in their taxes you know so it's not direct but they are kind of responsible for it and i feel like people in uk just because everything's free they're like oh just go yeah i guess because it's such a macro level that they're effect like they're affecting it so tiny that they're like ah yeah yeah i because of my upbringing and it costs thousand five hundred dollars for an ambulance if ever i'm ill even here i just i'm too scared to go to the hospital but that's a problem in itself as well you know because then oh yeah then we saw a lot during covet people were reluctant to go to hospital or their gp for certain things and now we're getting lots of late presentations of cancers that were missed and stuff like that and like really advancing spread everywhere it's quite horrible really so you know i think people should go to the doctor but they should just do it like the appropriate way you know rather than just going straight to any one one one yeah well you know go to your gp um or you know uh yeah call 101 or you know whatever um as opposed to just going straight to the hospital walk off to a e sit in a chair for four hours because no one really wants to see you because you're sitting there with like a graze in your knee um or gastro or some wind i felt like that's a pain that i'd never experienced before and i was like i'd rather be safe yeah it's like it's better to be safe than sorry isn't it and that was my only time i've ever used the nhs's funds but that makes you wonder actually thinking about it in america i wonder how much that stuff happens you know how how often do people not go to the doctor a lot i wonder actually it kind of makes me want to see like what the rates of like advanced cancer diagnoses are whether they're different between the two countries because uh oh because of that yeah i had travel insurance when i got into a cactus incident in the grand canyon and uh i was excited because i thought i'd be able to use the insurance but it's only the health insurance only works at certain practices so like when i went to the one that was closest they told me we don't accept it 450 bill just to remove some spines for me and it was either that or i drive 40 miles away so so i remember i she had really bad gastroenteritis in japan and i ended up in a japanese ambulance going to japanese hospital and they just ct scan everyone in japan so like oh like they didn't need to seize they just did it and they do charge for it even though i was a tourist i paid like i think 100 or 200 pounds for everything and that was like the drip the the treatment the the scan down because it just seems reasonable well i'm very thankful to live here i like to end these with like maybe this can happen in the future but well maybe the doctors kind of get paid a decent wage yes oh you're like we should bring it up health care is expensive yeah and we really haven't put much extra money into it despite the fact that our population's getting older getting bigger and that you sort of new treatments are coming out they're sort of becoming more and more expensive so if you invest in health you get paid back because people can work longer they can contribute to the economy more so there's a no-brainer really we'll see how that goes thanks for coming on the show that's okay the show on the show now bedroom thanks for joining me on my bedroom uh anything you want to shout out anywhere you want people to go um don't go to the hospital no first time we'll happily see you no i'm not going to shout out anything oh shout out to my sister yeah all right go subscribe to dodie thanks thanks everybody already uh thanks for coming on by if you guys want i made a video about the hospital you can check that on screen other than that uh i guess we'll see y'all next time thanks for coming bye oh the urologist only cost him twelve dollars i thought that was quite a bargain well what did he need it was that for catheter or something yeah i guess even wrote a joke saying the only one not taking the piss is the urologist

Channel: Evan Edinger

Views: 1,116,294

Keywords: British NHS Doctor Reacts to American Medical Bills, american medical bills, UK doctor reacts, british doctor, expensive medical bills, hospital bills, nhs, junior doctor, evan edinger, 2021, british vs american, UK vs us, american healthcare, british healthcare, england, doctor reacts, nhs doctor, iain clark, american hospital bills, cost of giving birth, cost of giving birth in the USA, medical insurance

Id: x0MBrfqwdEg

Length: 19min 54sec (1194 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 25 2021

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[u/PM_ME_BEEF_CURTAINS]

Poor Ian never gets a free lunch...

Evan, if you read this, let me know how I can buy Ian a lunch