I swear that my surgeon must be friggin' insane. As mentioned earlier, my surgery lasted 1 hour and 15 minutes. Take a guess how much he tried to have the insurance company pay him? Give up? The answer is $10,200. He must be insane to think that they would even consider giving him this much money for such a relatively simple and certainly short procedure. Needless to say the insurance company negotiated with him and got him to drop the cost to $2,400. The initial amount submitted seems llike what is known as 'price-gouging'. This is a negotiated discount of over 75%. Let me put this into some other terms for you. You are buying buy a new Honda Civic, the dealer wants you to pay $60,000 for the car until your friend calls them and gets them to drop the price to $15,000. You are buying a $150,000 house, the realtor wants you to pay $600,000 until your friend calls and gets them to drop the price to a normal level. What a strange way of doing things. It appears to me, that he was submitting the $10,000 amount to the insurance company just to see how much they would pay. I hate that bastard. He has been of no help to me. I can't wait to go to my final follow-up appointment next week and then never have to deal with him again. Incidently, I haven't even seen him since the surgery 4 weeks ago--not even when I was in his office getting my stitches out, or in the emergency room for the allergic reaction. He has been nick-named 'The Phantom', by my Mother for obvious reasons. The good news is that thanks to my insurance company, after my $300 deductible, the surgery itself will only cost me a little over $400 out of pocket.

I still have no idea what exactly cost $3,500 in the emergency room when I went for the reaction. I figured that the C/T scan and the chest x-rays were what cost so much, but I already received a bill from the radiologist for these two procedures, and now I am completely confused. The C/T Scan was $165 and the chest x-ray was $25. What the hell did they do for the other $3,300 dollars. The only other things they did were give me 1 pill and hooked me up to a variety of monitors. I guess each time the nurse asked me: 'How are you feeling?", must have cost $500. I can't wait to see what the insurance company negotiates that down to.