For millions of Americans, few things in life are more nightmarish than the prospect of contracting a serious illness or winding up critically injured.
And while it would be understandable if both of those experiences alone were enough for people to want to avoid them, the reality is that this isn’t the whole truth.
Because seeking treatment for these issues means exposing oneself to the pitfalls of the American health care system and the risk of going into debt to the tune of thousands of dollars.
And as one former nurse described in an explosive video, there’s a big reason why recent attempts to address this scary reality aren’t going as well as we might have hoped.
Months after quitting her job to expose what she’s seen within the healthcare system, a former nurse who goes by Christy uploaded a video to TikTok explaining “how stupid hospitals think you are.”
Her video largely has to do with how American hospitals have responded to a new requirement starting back in January of 2021 for them to make the prices of their most common procedures available to the public.
The first big problem she identified was that less than 10% of hospitals are complying with that requirement at the time of this writing.
And as she outlined, some hospitals are going as far as to explicitly state that they have no interest in doing so.
In at least one case, the hospital in question tried to frame this inaction as providing something that’s only useful to their competitors and not you, the patient. You know, the person they claim to care about who actually has to pay for these procedures.
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For Christy, this seemed akin to a car dealership not telling you how much a car actually costs until you’ve already signed on to buy it because they “care about you.”
However, the problems don’t stop even among hospitals that did agree to publish their price ranges.
Because while comparing the prices of colonoscopies, Christy found that one hospital charged an average of $1,400 for this procedure while another charged closer to $14,000.
As she put it, “Do you think that this facility is sticking that camera up your butt so much better than the other facility that they get to charge you $13,000 more? No!”
For Christy, the reason why she made the video you can see in full here is the same for why she quit nursing.
And it’s simply that she’s tired of seeing the health care system drive so many patients into unmanageable debt.
In her words, “Medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States, yet nobody is holding these hospitals accountable.”
