Health care bills?

Just read the following item in the on-line version of the Costa del Sol News which I thought might be of interest - and to save someone having a heart attack. It seems it is going to be rolled out over all Andalucia, if the last paragraph is correct.

"IF YOU are a patient at the Costa del Sol Hospital in Marbella you'll now receive what is called a ‘factura sombra'. Don't let it give you a heart attack. If you are receiving treatment under social security or indeed are covered by insurance you do not have to pay the total shown on the shadow bill. You are still covered in full. Rather, the purpose is to advise patients of what treatment they have received and what it has cost the public health system.

On Monday the scheme was launched at the Marbella hospital and around 50 patients received their ‘bill'. One such was Antonia Sánchez, aged 83, who had an operation on her cataracts. Her factura sombra showed the cost would have been 1,398.63 euros. The statements also include the notation, "financed by all the taxes of all the citizens" - just to remind you who is picking up the tab.

The Costa del Sol Hospital is the first in Andalucía to issue the fake bills - and at first only for certain treatments and diagnostic tests - but the regional government will be rolling out the scheme system wide. "

I am a Nurse and am amazed at how they can work this bill out so accurately, most employees are salaried and therefore would be there anyway, the path lab just do things as part of a routine and drugs are taken out of stock (Mostly), laundry is just in with all the other stuff, X-Ray staff are also there already. You could possibly get a ball park figure but it would be fairly inaccurate. Different for a paying patient as each item is billed, even then there is a certain (lot) amount of guesswork/rounding up etc. Now you have got the cost of the persons producing the bills to add on and all the associated costs (management I expect). I think the money could be put to better use, mind you it's possibly Europe money so counted separate!Who thinks of these things (And how much are they being paid). There that's my pennyworth. By the way in the UK its £741.00 per eye last time I looked!! so not far off UK Guestimates

I heard that people not paying into the system were going to have to pay the whole lot, not sure if that is true or not but would be a good idea to create more money for the government.

There are all sorts of angles to this. My husband's medications (for Parkinson's Disease) are phenomenally expensive (several hundred pounds a month) and he gets them all for free, from a health service to which he's never contributed. Meanwhile, the UK NHS is still benefiting from our tax payments, and has benefited for over 40 years from our tax and SS contributions, for most of which time we were relatively young and healthy and luckily not much in need of expensive healthcare. If the EU were really a cohesive entity, those contributions (or a realistic proportion of them) would have been handed over to the Spanish government when we moved here, instead of which they get a notional, and inadequate, payment from the UK.

I'm all for letting people know exactly what their healthcare is costing and who's paying for it (i.e. reminding them of where their taxes are going), but I'm not sure about the advisability of sending these pro-forma invoices to elderly people, who may think they actually have to pay them, and for whom the shock of receiving such a bill could be catastrophic.

Gobiker, I take your point about the difficulty of arriving at accurate figures, but this is achievable all over the world for private patients, and there's a lot to be said for accountability. Just because a service is in the public sector doesn't mean that the costs of providing that service can therefore be ignored or discounted - although I share your scepticism about the cost of the people paid to calculate such things. It seems insurmountable, but shouldn't be.