Nose for News by Sarah Stultz

It has been almost four months since my mother-in-law was first hospitalized for a difficult-to-control rapid heart beat, and we are finally in the stage of planning her return home — hopefully in the next few weeks.

She spent more than 70 days at St. Marys Hospital in Rochester and has spent the remainder of the time in rehabilitation at a nursing home in Albert Lea.

It was a worry early on about the cost of all the health care she received — not only because of the amount of time she was hospitalized but because of all the critical care services, surgeries and tests she required while she was hospitalized.

Our family was nervous, hoping that between the two insurance plans she has in place, she wouldn’t come out too debilitated. After she was released from the hospital and transitioned into rehabilitation, we waited as explanation of benefits paperwork and bills started rolling in.

After a few weeks, the paperwork was showing total submitted claims to be $700,000, then a million, and now from what it appears, the final cost for her entire hospitalization before insurance was about $1.6 million.

It might be a little too early to look at the total cost of what my in-laws will owe, but it appears that after processing through the insurance, they will owe less than $2,000.

Wow, what would they have done without their insurance?

It’s no wonder people put off going to the doctor or develop anxiety about having to pay off medical bills when a person can literally be one medical emergency away from bankruptcy if they don’t have good insurance.

Even with good insurance, the cost can be extensive.

My son is on three medications for his epilepsy, and the most expensive of those is about $300 a month after insurance — $800 to $1,000 a month before insurance.

How did these costs get so out of hand?

Our family has been blessed to have insurance that I would say has pretty good coverage compared to others, and we plan ahead for those costs, but what about others who don’t have as good of coverage and who have no choice but to pay even more for their child’s potentially life-saving prescription medications?

It gives me a headache even thinking about it.

I don’t have any answers on what needs to be done to make these costs more manageable for people, but I do know we are not the only ones facing these challenges. There are thousands, if not millions, of others in this country who experience the same things and who struggle because of these costs — not only the cost of health care, but the cost of insurance and the cost of prescription medication.

Something has to change.

Sarah Stultz is the managing editor of the Tribune. Her column appears every Tuesday.