Great job, capitalism! A DIY x-ray machine is cheaper than an ER visit
We are definitely not endorsing the home project, but the numbers certainly add up
Aux Features X-ray generator
William Osman, a YouTuber running one of the countless “Science FTW!” channels out there these days, released a video last week detailing a recent hospital visit requiring x-rays that resulted in a dizzying $69,210.32 invoice. “I’m a slave to medical debt now. I have to sell all my things, I have to sell my friends’ belongings,” Osman grouses, before the ol’ comedic switcheroo courtesy of his long-suffering wife. She assures both him and the audience that, thanks to their “really good” health insurance policy, he is only expected to pony up about $2500. Combined with annual insurance premiums, the whole thing will cost him around $8500. Whew. What a relief…
Great(ish) news for the Osmans, but as our host explains, this is very much not the case for the approximately 27.5 million Americans out there with absolutely zero health insurance. “The reason hospitals charge so much is because they know insurance is going to low-ball them,” Osman summarizes of his coverage and subsequent bill. “The problem is hospitals treat uninsured people the exact same way. What you’re supposed to do is the same thing insurance does with hospitals: you fight them.”
Of course, this doesn’t happen nearly as much as it should due to your average individual’s general lack of resources, time, and energy required to successfully combat the United States’ medical-industrial complex. To demonstrate the economic and ethical lunacy, Osman set out on a self-admittedly reckless endeavor: build his own fully functioning x-ray machine for less than his actual medical bills.
And, wouldn’t you know it? Thanks to the power of online consumerism, he was able to do just that. Using a $400, 60,000 volt power supply, a $155 x-ray vacuum tube removed from a discarded dental x-ray head, multiple geiger counters, and a “giant roll” of lead sheet metal, Osman constructed a functional machine with (debatably) minimal risk of radiation poisoning or electrocution.
“My will to do science is significantly stronger than my will to live,” Osman declares at one point, later adding, “This is my magnum opus. This is the most dangerous contraption I have ever built,” two statements we cannot deny after watching the entire 17-minute video.
After a predictable amount of trial-and-error (expert tip: don’t use metal soup cans as your structure for a jerry-rigged, high-voltage electrical contraption), Osman succeeded in photographing the insides of both his iPhone and actual hand. By his estimates, one could conceivably leave an urgent care with a bill roughly equivalent to the cost of just doing the damn thing yourself.
“We did it, team. We showed the medical industry who’s boss,” Osman cheekily announces towards the video’s conclusion, a joke that unfortunately does little to ease our righteous anger directed towards a largely broken, barbaric national ethos that would rather wage disastrous Forever Wars than protect its most vulnerable populations.
[via Digg]
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62 Comments
Shooting ionizing radiation at yourself willy nilly in the garage doesn’t seem smart.
Maybe it’ll hit a spider or two and the medical industry will have all new problems. And so will that guy’s uncle, I guess.
Criminally under-starred comment.
Uncle Ben died because he had to Uber to the hospital instead of taking an ambulance
Neither does a first-world country without universal heath care!
Indeed
Marie Curie was plenty smart!Though I guess she wasn’t spending her time recreating experiments from the previous century (or in this case, two centuries ago) and combining it with some poorly considered story about a topical topic to make a YouTube video to look like she’s smart.
I’m actually more astonished that digg still exists…
It’s funny, because Digg came about a year before Reddit, but Reddit won.
thanks to their “really good” health insurance policy, he is only
expected to pony up about $2500. Combined with annual insurance
premiums, the whole thing will cost him around $8500. Whew. What a
relief…
Only in the US is this considered normal. $8500 for some fucking x-rays.
Osman set out on a self-admittedly reckless endeavor: build his own fully functioning x-ray machine for less than his actual medical bills.
That’s not a solution.
$8,500 for some X-rays.. and a full year of other medical coverage.
or about $2000 in tax for a fully functional universal healthcare system
This is still prohibitively expensive for 90% of people in america, enough so that many forgo any health related expenses until the problem has exacerbated itself to a dangerous degree.
Or I could pay $0 for some X-rays and a full year of other medical coverage, like people in nearly every other wealthy country do.
I mean, you pay $X in taxes, but that’s still a better deal.
We could fund health care. Or we could fund a twenty-year invasion that killed 70,000 civilians. As always, it’s a difficult choice for us.
Nearly every wealthy country has some form of cost sharing, though, so it’s objectively untrue that it would be $0 (well, ignoring the $ part).
Well, that’s just his premiums, which don’t necessarily cover other treatment he might need. Depends on his max deductible.
My x-rays are $0 (just a co-pay). I had an MRI a few months ago, it was $100! I was livid. People tell me this is good insurance. I can’t imagine paying $2500 to see if you broke your bones. What a world!
Can’t wait for next week’s video: “I’m Rapidly Losing My Hair and Vomiting Blood For Some Reason”
MY BODY MY CHOICE (to radiate and die painfully)
You’ll be eating your words when he develops superpowers! My data confirms that, much like Ant-Man, he’ll be able to grow to an incredible size!No wait, sorry, that’s going to be his tumor’s superpower.
Hi, I’m Johnny Knoxville and this is homemade X-Ray machine…
When I was a kid I was told not to stand directly in front of the microwave while it’s operating. I feel bad for this dude’s neighbors.
So what we’ve established is that reliable quality control and trained technicians cost m0ney.For his next trick, he will establish that skateboarding down the highway costs less than an ambulance ride.
That’s why I’m treating my COVID with horse dewormer from the feed store.I’m too smart to fall for Big Medical’s fancy schmancy ER putting chips in me.
You might think that’s funny, but how many wormless horses have you seen with COVID?CheCkMaTe LiBs!
This is an aside, but I’m pretty sure ivermectin is used in a lot of animals, including cats and dogs (non-equestrian vet people I know immediately were like, what why ivermectin it’s for worms), so1) I don’t understand this focus on “horse dewormer”, as we have waaay more cats and dogs and it’s a commonly used treatment2) I think both cats and dogs have had confirmed cases of SARS-Cov-2 (I dunno if them being symptomatic counts as COVID-19)
Because in cats and dogs it’s not for intestinal worms, but heartworms, and there are far better and more available heartworm medications that treat a wider array of parasites, and ivermectin overdose in both sets of animals can still cause blindness and coma.
Horses, being larger, can take a lot more of the stuff, and need it more often because they literally eat intestinal worm eggs almost all the time, especially if they do general grazing. Some people deworm horses every two months. As well, going with their formulations is essentially like buying the stuff in bulk, as concentrated as it is, and not least because it comes in apple flavored paste instead of pill form. Thus the focus on horse dewormer: quite simply because that’s what people have been buying.
Cats and dogs have had confirmed cases of COVID, yes. Whether you could match their infections with whether or not they’d had ivermectin is gonna be a tough data point to find, and rather pointless, considering they get the drug in the “micrograms per month” range, and for cats, many times topically instead of ingested.
I was surprised to hear about the horse use as well, since we have it here for controlling mites on the guinea pigs. Maybe I should craigslist what we have left for another ‘guinea pig’.
My favorite thing to imagine is how the people eating it must look afterwards.We use ivermectin on our horses as medically recommended. The label says “tastes like apples”, the horses strongly disagree. The contortions they go through as they try to physically separate themselves from the horrid taste in their mouths is… well, it’s beautiful.
People keep asking if I’ve noticed any side effects.I just say “neigh!”
So what we’ve established is that reliable quality control and trained technicians cost m0ney.
But it seems to cost a lot more in the US than it does in pretty much every other country. But the healthcare in the US isn’t any better.
Yep. Among other things, the USA is very bad about seeing to it people from the bottom few quintiles get routine preventive care, while indulging every hypochondriacal moment of folks from the top few. No routine bloodwork for the poor, CAT scans for sore knees for the rich. It’s not easy to combine a higher per-capita spend with worse outcomes, but we’ve managed it!
The funding is different. If we took out the profit in in health insurance, we could afford quality health care. CEO’s making in excess of 14 million dollars are generally not essential to good health.
he is only expected to pony up about $2500. Combined with annual insurance premiums, the whole thing will cost him around $8500. Whew. What a relief…Let’s remember that the only way to beat this system is to stop using it. Cancel your insurance now! I promise you will come out ahead.
I’m not sure what insurance plan he’s on, but on my varying plans dependent on employers I’ve never paid more than $50 for an X-Ray. I’m not saying the healthcare system isn’t insanely fucked up (it really is), but I’m not sure how X-Rays could’ve cost $2500 with insurance.
The way I read it is $2,500 for an ER visit during which he had X-rays. I don’t think the itemized cost is revealed.
Ah yes, I think you’re right, I misread the first time, the total ER visit would cost him $2500. Of that, the imaging costs were likely pretty minimal, so it’s strange that it’s framed, both by the article and by himself, as home X-Ray machine vs. ER X-ray machine.
You know what a deductible is? ER co-pay? Specialist co-pay?I just had to pay $500- for bloodwork plus a $70- specialist co-pay. Not sure I want to know what I’d pay for imaging and hope I don’t have to find out.Not everyone has good insurance. My employer is too small to offer a good plan. (First person to tell me to get a different job is gonna find out how much coverage they have themselves.)
Yes sir, I’ve suffered from chronic conditions most of my adult life and have had to do deep dives into insurance, including times when I was unemployed and took out Obamacare. Because of that, I always pony up for a good PPO, even if it costs me more. I reread the article per the above poster, and it said $2500 for total ER Cost, not X-Rays themselves, which makes more sense. The X-Ray itself likely didn’t cost him an arm and a leg out of pocket, but certainly the full ER experience costing $2500 makes sense. I still think this is disingenuously framed.
I always pony up for a good PPO, even if it costs me more.
Cool. Other people need that money for food and rent.
While I won’t defend the price or America’s crazy health care system, presumably what you’re paying for is the analysis of the x-ray rather than the photos.
Nah. The EOB will show you the radiologist analysis separately. Of course, with my insurance, the x-ray itself itemized was $4.50.
Even if this x-ray machine worked well and safely, you’d also have to teach yourself enough medicine to realize every situation, including how to interpret your own medical history, that an xray would be a good diagnostic tool. Then being able to interpret the x-ray.Among many other things.Sure, US health care is stupid expensive, but I guess recreating technology from the 19th century on the… higher budget than they had is the same thing as taking down the US medical industrial complex.
Based on the people replying to this as if anyone is actually suggesting it makes financial and medical sense to build your own x-ray machine to workaround high us healthcare costs, I feel obliged to point out that an x-ray of his head would show his tongue planted firmly in cheek.
If they don’t wanna give totally free healthcare to all, how about forcing insurance companies and hospitals to charge what things actually cost. Like a ambulance ride, is that costing 3k in reality? Fucking no.
This entire article is just a huge misunderstanding of how medical billing and insurance works. That’s largely OK since precious few people really do understand it and many people involved in it haven’t a clue, but if you are going to consider yourself a journalist and not a muckraker, you should do some research.Rather than take this down line by line, I’ll just focus on this inaccuracy: “The reason hospitals charge so much is because they know insurance is going to low-ball them,” Osman summarizes of his coverage and subsequent bill. “The problem is hospitals treat uninsured people the exact same way. What you’re supposed to do is the same thing insurance does with hospitals: you fight them.”I guess you could be generous and call it a half truth since insurance companies do try to low ball providers, but that reimbursement is negotiated and large health companies do have some leverage with private insurance companies. Health care providers deal with a large number of payors and might negotiate a different price for every service with each one. Any one of those would happily pay you less if you bill them less, so you have to make sure your charges are always higher than the highest payment you have negotiated. Some of those payments may be formulas involving percentages or may adjust yearly based on COLA, inflation, LIBOR, {s} soybean futures, 7.34 month T-bill prices, or how many points some fantasy football team earns in week 7 of the NFL season {/s} (probably). While an uninsured person will get a bill for the full list charge, they don’t actually expect anybody to pay that. You do have to negotiate and that is a pain in the ass, but the negotiations are usually quick. Call the hospital, tell them what you can afford, supply tax returns to prove that you aren’t lying. Hospitals don’t want to send you to collections or go to bankruptcy court. It is almost as much a pain in the ass for them as it is for you to do so. That also allows the provider to right off bad debt which is helpful for them.Don’t get me wrong, the cost of American medical care and the methods of billing and payment are deeply fucked up in more ways than I can explain here, but this article gets exactly none of them right and spreading misinformation never helps anything.
Call the hospital, tell them what you can afford, supply tax returns to
prove that you aren’t lying. Hospitals don’t want to send you to
collections or go to bankruptcy court. It is almost as much a pain in
the ass for them as it is for you to do so. That also allows the provider to right off bad debt which is helpful for them.
This is the part that is broken, you see. In a civilized country, you would get the medical care you needed, and not have to know which hoops to jump through to keep the hospital that saved your life from taking your house.
I believe I pretty much said that so, yes, I see. I called it “a pain in the ass” and “deeply fucked up.” I am well aware that medical expenses are the leading cause of bankruptcy in this country and that doesn’t get brought up nearly often enough.The point is, you don’t need a lawyer and it isn’t contentious. You aren’t negotiating a new trade agreement with China or the withdrawal from Afghanistan. It’s usually about as hard as getting a library card and they want to work with you. They don’t want your house. They don’t want to take you to court. They mostly just want to balance their books, move on, and leave you happy enough to trust them to take care of you again.
You aren’t negotiating a new trade agreement with China or the withdrawal from Afghanistan.Too soon.
The article claims that the insured and the uninsured are billed exactly the same, but that’s not true at all, at least not necessarily. I was told by someone at my local hospital (when I was griping about my bill) that there are literally two different pay scales for the insured and the uninsured. The bill is still criminally high if you’re not insured, but it won’t be as high as if you are insured. Not only that, I was told this because I have “catastrophic” insurance, a classification insurance companies devised to justify requiring ridiculously high deductibles ($6K in my case). They will give you the lower rate even if you are insured but you can show you have a high deductible.Believe me, I still think the system sucks. But get the facts right if you are going to criticize it.
They have to charge everyone the same prices, but they can settle for different amounts based on circumstances, contracts, regulations.
The list price charge is completely irrelevant. It is entirely artificial, doesn’t represent anything real, only exists to create a high baseline, and is ignored by all players in the game. People without insurance get caught in that system because nobody has already negotiated a true price for them so they have to do it themselves.
I see the basic beginnings of a new superhero origin story and errant radiation creating his arch nemesis.
I’d like to point out that William Osman is also the person who actually found out how much sawdust you can put in a rice crispy treat before people notice.
You can also make a stethoscope out of two funnels, a tube, and a balloon. Since that costs about five dollars, clearly any time a cardiologist charges more than five dollars for anything, that means capitalism is bad.
Seems like he’s cheating when a key component comes from an old x-ray machine.
The only thing sadder than the medical industry complex is the number of people here who seem to be taking this video at face value and thinking that it is actually advocating blasting yourself with radiation regularly and/or giving actual financial facts instead of being all about “look at this crazy shit you can do for not that much cash”
“By his estimates, one could conceivably leave an urgent care with a bill roughly equivalent to the cost of just doing the damn thing yourself.”That’s not factoring in treatment for electrical shock and/or radiation sickness and/or burns.
It would have been much more charming if he had spelled it “X-Ray Masheen” like a Calvin joint. Maybe with the R backwards.