Snake-bite victim socked with $55K bill?!!

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signalmankenneth

Verified User
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/snake-bite-victim-socked-with--55k-bill-150152873.html

This is what is wrong with America's healthcare system, what a ripoff?!!

You would think this lady was bitten by something exotic?!!

Fierce Snake or Inland Taipan

poisonous-snake.jpg

While I did say that I would not include multiple sub-species in this list, the incredible Inland Taipan deserves a spot of its own. It has the most toxic venom of any land snake in the world. The maximum yield recorded for one bite is 110mg, enough to kill about 100 humans, or 250,000 mice! With an LD/50 of 0.03mg/kg, it is 10 times as venomous as the Mojave Rattlesnake, and 50 times more than the common Cobra. Fortunately, the Inland Taipan is not particularly aggressive and is rarely encountered by humans in the wild. No fatalities have ever been recorded, though it could potentially kill an adult human within 45 minutes.
 
You guys are always saying things should be made in America. Well, that's what things cost here.
 
Clovis said:
You guys are always saying things should be made in America. Well, that's what things cost here.
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Not really.

Costs $100 in Mexico. Some hospitals charge as low as $7,900 per dose.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/arizona-woman-feeling-pain-83-046-bill-anti-venom-drug-seeking-medical-treatment-scorpion-sting-article-1.1152754

oh gee, look - after media coverage the Arizona hospital dropped its price to $8,000
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/business/articles/20120920arizona-hospital-cuts-scorpion-antivenom-price-80-percent.html

Costs the hospitals about $3,500

Mexico-based Instituto Bioclon produces more than 250,000 vials of the scorpion antivenom each year for Mexican residents. The Mexican version of the drug is sold for about $100 per vial at pharmacies or for less at government-funded clinics and hospitals in Mexico.

Instituto Bioclon also makes the drug for the U.S. To pass muster with the Food and Drug Administration, McNally said, the Mexican factory had to make expensive improvements to its manufacturing process for the American version. Batches of the drug also are subject to continual testing by FDA inspectors, he added.

"It is manufactured under a different process," McNally said. "The Mexican manufacturers coined the phrase 'the long process' " when comparing the American with the Mexican version of the drug.

Other economic factors contribute to the drug's prices, too. McNally said about 4,000 scorpion stings require antivenom each year in the U.S. And Rare Disease Therapeutics must price the drug high enough that it can pay FDA fees.

Although the privately owned Rare Disease Therapeutics does not disclose its finances, the company said it sells the serum to a distributor for the average wholesale price of $3,500 per vial. The distributor typically sells the drug directly to hospitals and other medical providers for about $3,780 per vial.
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The point is hospital costs are exorbitant and out of control. Hospitals charge $1.00 for a single aspirin, when you often can
purchase a whole bottle for that amount. I had a week's hospital stay, back in Feb, for anemia. The bill was 24K. Outrageous.
Drs. Ordered unnecessary tests, my blood was drawn 15 minutes before I was discharged. I was put in a private room, a bonus, but not necessary. Bills are routinely inflated, by the provider.
 
SmarterthanYou said:
I should start a snake venom milking business. looks like fortunes could be made.
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It requires enormous patience by the looks of it. Pfizer got out of the coral snake anti-venom business, marketed as Coralmyn, as they were not making any money.

The first step is getting your hands on a lot of snakes, which are quarantined and monitored for weeks to months to ensure their good health. Before milking, put on protective gloves. Famed snake handler Bill Haast used his bare hands, but was eventually bitten on the right index finger, rendering him unable to wrangle serpents–his lifelong passion. Move the snake into a clean milking room. With some of the most deadly snakes, like banded kraits or black mambas, experts often use a short-acting anesthetic to calm the snake down.

Next, grab the snake with the thumb and index finger at the very back of the head, just behind the angle of the jaw where the venom glands reside. This allows you to press on the glands while preventing the snake from turning its head and striking you. Opening a snake's jaws may require gentle pressure, and with vipers, you might have to use forceps to swivel their fangs into the upright position and pull back the sheath covering the fang's hollow tip.

Take a vial and cover it with a rubber or plastic film. Then, snake in hand, push the fangs through the plastic (or let the snake simply strike on its own). Gently squeeze the glands to get out all the venom. In some cases, antivenom makers use a weak electric current to stimulate venom excretion. Carefully remove the fangs from the film. Snakes with fangs in the back of their mouths, such as colubrids, may require special tubes to bite into, which drain into a collection vial.

To get enough venom, each snake must be milked many times. For example, in 1965, the National Institutes of Health asked Haast, who founded the Miami Serpentarium, to produce 1 pint of coral snake venom. It took him, a man of unrivaled skill and patience, a total of three years and 69,000 milkings to get that much, from which the first and only American coral antivenom was made. Wyeth (now owned by Pfizer) produced this same antivenom until 2003, when it closed the factory. Since then the FDA–which must approve antivenom the same way it approves other drugs–has extended the expiration date of the scant remaining supplies three times because the supply threatens to run out soon.
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You can see why it is so expensive though!

All these steps certainly add up on the balance sheet. Mike Touger, an emergency medicine specialist at Jacobi, says his group has paid as much as $1600 per vial of CroFab, and Boyer says a snakebite that needs antivenom requires an average of 20 to 25 vials. Touger recalls the case of a man bitten by a timber rattlesnake, whose venom disrupts blood's ability to form clots; the man bled for three weeks and went through 30 vials of CroFab. "That's $30,000 in pharmacy costs alone," Touger says. The patient survived, as has everyone treated for venomous snakebites at Jacobi since the treatment center opened in 1981. But the time and money required to make antivenom, combined with the fact that most deadly snakebites happen in developing countries, has decreased the financial incentive for drug companies to produce more antivenom, contributing to a worldwide shortage.
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There is another way to do it!

There's one other, quirkier way to make antivenom–one that physicians don't exactly recommend. For decades Bill Haast, who died this June at the age of 100, milked about 100 snakes a day with his bare hands, and in 1948 began injecting himself with increasing doses of diluted cobra venom in order to develop his own immune resistance. At the time of his death (not caused by snakebite), he'd survived 172 bites from many of the world's deadliest snakes, including a blue krait, a king cobra and a Pakistani pit viper. He flew around the world to donate transfusions of his antibody-rich blood to treat 21 snakebite victims. Venezuela made him an honorary citizen after he traveled into the jungle to donate blood to a young snake-bitten boy. According to his wife Nancy, all 21 patients survived.
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poet said:
The point is hospital costs are exorbitant and out of control. Hospitals charge $1.00 for a single aspirin, when you often can
purchase a whole bottle for that amount. I had a week's hospital stay, back in Feb, for anemia. The bill was 24K. Outrageous.
Drs. Ordered unnecessary tests, my blood was drawn 15 minutes before I was discharged. I was put in a private room, a bonus, but not necessary. Bills are routinely inflated, by the provider.
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Then buy a bottle and take your own. Or just don't go. Stop yer whining. You lived didnt you? Unfortunately for the rest of society
 
other countries have a way of handling these things.


why is it the right thinks this country cant do the same?


historically failed ideas for a platform is why
 
Poet is not howey.

I have seen them posting on two separate sites at the same time.

they are NOT the same person you idiots
 
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