These parents were charged $785 for a Band-Aid
New parents Malcolm and Sarah Bird say they were slapped with a $629 bill ($785 CAD) after their child went to hospital with a bleeding finger.
The “treatment” they received? A Band-Aid.
The couple took their one-year-old daughter Colette to an emergency room in Connecticut after Sarah accidentally nipped the child’s finger while clipping her nails.
“She snipped too far on the pinky, right at the end and cut the finger and there was an enormously large amount of blood,” Malcolm told Vox in an interview.
“We were brand new parents, we were freaked out. This was the first time that anything bad had happened.”
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Fortunately a doctor advised the parents their baby would be fine, explaining that our fingertips contain capillaries which can cause excessive bleeding when cut.
After placing her finger under a running water, Colette was patched up with a Band-Aid and sent them family home.
A week passed before the family was hit with the $629 medical bill.
“My first thought was, how could this possibly cost $629?” Bird recalled. “So I wrote the hospital a letter, expecting them to say: ‘Yeah, that’s a bit excessive,’ and lower the price.”
His insurance company also intervened with negotiations, having the total costs cut to $440 ($550 CAD) — but for the young dad, that wasn’t good enough.
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John Murphy, the chief executive of the relevant health network at the time, said the Band-Aid didn’t cost $629; it was actually $7. The remaining amount was the cost of seeing the doctor and using emergency services.
“The remainder of the charge was associated with the use of the facility and staff,” he wrote. “We staff the emergency department 24-hours a day, every day of the year, and stand ready to treat whoever walks through our door, be it a gunshot victim or a patient with a stroke.”
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