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20-year old Reddit user zcypher recently had to go to the hospital to get his inflamed appendix removed. After his appendectomy was complete, he left the hospital within 24 hours. Later on, he was given a bill that came up to a massive $55,029.31 USD. Luckily for the man, his insurance covered majority of the bill, but he still has to pay $11,119.53… which is no small sum but is significantly lower than what he would have owed if he did not have insurance.
He posted pictures of the bill to inform people about just how high some hospital bills can get.
“I never truly understood how much health care in the U.S. costs until I got appendicitis in October,” he wrote on Reddit. “I’m a 20-year-old guy. Thought other people should see this to get a real idea of how much an unpreventable illness costs in the U.S.”
“I think you can see how outrageous some of these costs are,” he said in reference to some of the higher prices on the bill. Among many of the other expenses, room and board cost him $4,878, and his time time spent in the recovery room, which according to zcypher was only 2 hours, cost $7,501.
It seems that zcypher may have gotten lucky with the $55,000 bill. According to a study,which was done at the University of California San Francisco and took information from 19,000 patients getting the same operation as the Reddit user, the cost could be as low as $1,529 and as high as $182,955.
