I asked a medical question earlier and everyone was super helpful and I’m thankful for that. Unfortunately, my girlfriend took a turn for the worse and we had to call an ambulance and get a CT scan in the middle of the night. Luckily everything appeared to be normal. She just had a very poorly timed migraine.
My issue is I think we’re expected to pay the rest of the hospital bill in cash, and I am not sure if we can pull enough money out at once to pay it off.
Are there any tricks hospitals try to pull here to rip off foreigners we should know about or things we should ask? They wouldn’t provide an estimate yesterday, so it is quite scary.
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I had an X-ray and CT scan done on my shoulder last month. With insurance I paid around 7k, and while I don’t have the paperwork near me, I believe the before-insurance-deductions total was around 25k or so for both X and CT. Just a random datapoint. This was in Niigata.
No insurance? Are you resident here?
Good to hear she’s OK. This was like 4 or 5 years ago but I got a CT scan and some other tests while not on the Japanese insurance and I was kind of astonished how cheap it was, I think I paid about 10,000 yen. This was at a clinic not a large hospital – I have a vague notion that you pay a bit more if the hospital is large.
I’m not saying there are *no* shenanigans in this country but generally I don’t think there’s a rip-off-foreigners culture in Japanese healthcare, or any attempt to overcharge uninsured people. If anything I expect it’s a nuisance for them if they have to chase unpaid bills. The prices are fixed by the government depending on some kind of calculated formula. There’s definitely gaming of the system but it’s more about getting more money out of the *insurance* system. For example my dentist likes to split treatment up into lots of little visits instead of doing everything at once.
This is entirely anecdotal so YMMV and all that, but 3-4 years back one of my parents, while visiting in Tokyo, had a fall and a suspected fracture on a Sunday so we ended up in the nearest hospital on the holiday emergency rota for that day and they did various checks including (IIRC) a CT scan, and the total bill came to something like 30,000 or 40,000 yen (which included a CD-ROM with the scan data).
>Are there any tricks hospitals try to pull here to rip off foreigners we should know about or things we should ask? They wouldn’t provide an estimate yesterday, so it is quite scary.
No. The medical industry has pretty strict price controls. It won’t be cheap but it also won’t be insanely expensive. My father when visiting had an emergency visit to stitch up an injury and it cost <10,000. His dialysis was only 30,000 a visit. This isn’t some 3rd world rip off country or the US, this is a civilized country.
And why no insurance? You’re residents you should have insurance.