National Nurses United

6 N A T I O N A L N U R S E W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G J A N U A R Y | F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 4 NEWS BRIEFS NATIONAL A s if the surgery for a burst appendix was not painful enough, a Sacramento-area patient got really agitated when he saw the bill, $55,000 charged by Sutter General Hospital in Sacramento, Calif. The 20-year-old posted his bill on the social news website Reddit. Rapidly, it went viral across the nation with the help of, among others, ABC healthcare reporter Sydney Lupkin. Two days later, Lupkin had another story to report, one that provided some context for the huge bill. "New data released by National Nurses United," she wrote, "revealed that not only do a handful of hospitals charge patients more than 10 times the actual cost of treat- ment, but that prices have been steadily increasing for nearly two decades." Inflated hospital charges, which rarely gained media notice when NNU's research arm, the Institute for Health and Socio- Economic Policy, began collecting, analyz- ing, and reporting on the data more than a decade ago, have exploded into a national scandal in recent years. Nearly everyone has a story now. Like Sean Recchi, profiled by Steven Brill in Time magazine last year, who had to pay MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston $48,900, due in advance for treatment for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Or on a smaller scale, Chelsea Manning, hit with a $3,000 bill from a Port Huron, Mich. hospital for six stitches after she tripped while running. Or Arch Roberts, Jr., charged more than $2,000 for three stitches at a Jacksonville, Fla. hospital after being bitten by a dog, as New York Times reporter Elizabeth Rosenthal recently wrote. Or California Nurses Association member Mike Collins, RN who took his 5-year-old son with severe ear pain to Sutter's Eden Medical Center in Castro Valley, Calif. and received a $1,956 bill for having earwax removed. Or retired CNA board member Genel Morgan, RN who went to another Sutter ER, Mills-Peninsula in Burlingame, Calif. last October for a kidney stone. For about a three- hour stay, a CT scan, pain and anti-inflamma- tory meds, and an IV, the bill was $9,851.67. NNU hospital charges report shows ever-growing

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