{"id":7155,"date":"2016-11-14T09:07:09","date_gmt":"2016-11-14T15:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=7155"},"modified":"2016-11-14T09:07:09","modified_gmt":"2016-11-14T15:07:09","slug":"bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=7155","title":{"rendered":"Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A href=\"http:\/\/www.uta.edu\/faculty\/story\/2311\/Misc\/2013,2,26,MedicalCostsDemandAndGreed.pdf\">Steven Brill<\/a> <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>When Sean Recchi, a 42-year-old from Lancaster, Ohio, was told last March that he had non-Hodgkin\u2019s lymphoma, his wife Stephanie knew she had to get him to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Stephanie\u2019s father had been treated there 10 years earlier, and she and her family credited the doctors and nurses at MD Anderson with extending his life by at least eight years.<br \/>&nbsp;<br \/>\nBecause Stephanie and her husband had recently started their own small technology business, they were unable to buy comprehensive health insurance. For $469 a month, or about 20% of their income, they had been able to get only a policy that covered just $2,000 per day of any hospital costs. \u201cWe don\u2019t take that kind of discount insurance,\u201d said the woman at MD Anderson when Stephanie called to make an appointment for Sean.<br \/>&nbsp;<br \/>\nStephanie was then told by a billing clerk that the estimated cost of Sean\u2019s visit \u2014 just to be examined for six days so a treatment plan could be devised \u2014 would be $48,900, due in advance. Stephanie got her mother to write her a check. \u201cYou do anything you can in a situation like<br \/>\nthat,\u201d she says. The Recchis flew to Houston, leaving Stephanie\u2019s mother to care for their two teenage children.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Steven Brill When Sean Recchi, a 42-year-old from Lancaster, Ohio, was told last March that he had non-Hodgkin\u2019s lymphoma, his wife Stephanie knew she had to get him to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Stephanie\u2019s father had been treated there 10 years earlier, and she and her family credited the doctors and nurses at [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7155"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7155"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7156,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7155\/revisions\/7156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}