My mom ended up in the emergency room last night and was transferred to a hospital. Before looking at all her tests and reading her file, a doctor came into her room, sat at the foot of her bed, and told her "You're not on private insurance and I don't want to take you as a patient but I guess I will. No other doctor here is going to want to take you. I'm going to bill $2,000 for this and only get $200. If you end up needing this surgery, it's going to cost you $30,000. Can you afford that?"

Luckily, my mom is a bad ass who has dealt with BS like this before and she calmly just nodded and let the doctor speak her peace and continue with her introductory intimidation. She also calmly listened as the patient advocate came in and, in less direct words, said the same thing as the doctor. Later, the doctor refused to run more tests, refused to let my mom switch to a doctor who did want to run tests, and tried to send my mom home with a 102 degree fever after receiving two bags of blood and no information about what is making her ill.

As I said, my mom is uniquely built to deal with nonsense like this, so she ended up advocating for herself and they ended up backtracking and the nurses basically took over (doctor signed discharged papers, nurse and staff recommended against discharge) and have been giving her very good care but I was curious what other doctors or folks in the medical industry think about this. The nurses and patient advocate acted mortified (sincerely or not) when they heard what the doctor said to my mom and one of them firmly requested that my mom to recount this part of her experience in detail on her exit survey.

This was not good, yeah?