I'm fired up. Not only does visiting a pain specialist cost an arm and a leg, they also feel it necessary to test my urine for drugs. Do they assume the worst and figure that if someone is coming to see them that there is a chance they are not in pain, but making it up to seek narcotics? I suppose that scenario does play out on occasion.
The pain clinic I now go to has a drug testing policy. There is a mandatory urinalysis (UA) on your first visit, and they can randomly select you for UAs at future visits. So I go along with their policy and submit a specimen to them on my first visit. It's not a big deal to me at the time. It turns into a big deal when I get a statement from my insurance showing that the urinalysis cost $500.00. No, that was not a typo. Apparently a pee test there costs $500.00! Are you kidding me? Holy cow. I've had to take pre-employment drug tests in the past and I know those only cost approximately $50.00.
I called the clinic and inquired if they had made a typo, maybe keyed in an extra zero in their figure when they billed my insurance. They informed me that they had not. They said that they ran ten different tests on my sample and each test costs $50.00. Wow.
Here's my beef with the situation...I'm not seeking any heavy duty painkillers or narcotics of any sort. I'm simply seeking therapeutic Botox treatment. Even the doctor agreed that there isn't anything else left to try at this point. I also made it clear to him that I'm not agreeable to any sort of narcotic pain medication because I just don't want to go down that road.
No wonder insurance is so expensive. $500 pee tests are just one tiny example of exorbitant costs.
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