No more sleepless nights; I'm all through walking the floor

[austin_dern]

In other news we got the statement of benefits regarding what our insurance company thought of our rabies vaccination experience last month. Mercifully, they decided that it was an appropriate and correct use of medical services, and are covering all but a tolerable fraction of the expense, and that should close out the whole problem, especially once the bats are finally declared sealed out of the attic.

And it is awfully good the insurance company didn't object to our vaccination because the expense turned out to be enormous: about seventeen thousand dollars. Each. This is nearly twice what the highest cost bunny_hugger had found casting about online indicated. That's the kind of expense that would just destroy us. Maybe not for life, I suppose, but at least for quite a few years to come.

This fact produced all kinds of weird thoughts in my mind, including one that's fundamentally irrational: if I had believed it could cost me as much as my car, I probably wouldn't have gone for it. It's almost exactly the bit that was funny in Jack Benny's ``Your Money Or Your Life'' comeback: when I thought the risk-and-benefit analysis was just a matter of ``do this for the chance it will save your life'' I came down on the do-this side; but suddenly, when the risk isn't just my life but also my savings, I feel more like I was being ridiculous. I don't like having my irrationality stand out so.

Trivia: For his doctorate Louis Pasteur had to submit two theses, one in physics and one in chemistry. The physics one was on studies using the polarimeter. The chemsitry one studied the saturation capacity of arsenious acid. Source: Louis Pasteur, Patrice Debré, Translated by Elborg Forster.

Currently Reading: American Cornball: A Laffopedic Guide To The Formerly Funny, Christopher Miller.

PS: Reading The Comics, October 20, 2014: No Images This Edition, mathematics comics that I don't have to include pictures of, for a change. Fifth of these since the last roundup.

Comments

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

Wow.

Just... wow, I'm glad it worked out for the best.... *hugs!*

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I am, too, but it's terrifying to see what could very plausibly have happened.

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

$17k? Yipes! My son is required to get rabies shots (he's in a Vet Tech program) but we've been told shots will be about $900 for the series because the insurance won't cover it. Even this is unacceptable.

Glad you two are OK.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Rabies vaccination and rabies post-exposure prophylaxis are different because post-exposure you have to have immune globulin (a varying amount by weight, we each had six of them) and it is the globulin that is the fantastically expensive part.

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

I guess this beats the alternative... ;o)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I suppose! At least if the alternative were death by rabies. It's weird to think that the problem is we don't actually know we were at particular risk of death, though.

[moxie_man]

$17K??? EACH!?! Your insurance company is being taken for a ride.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Probably not by as much as you think. Rabies PEP is phenomenally expensive.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yeah; it's not really gotten mass-produced, is the problem. (It seems funny to say a lack of need for mass-produced post-exposure prophylactic rabies vaccine is a problem. Maybe ``issue'' is the better word.) But there's less of it to have than there is of, say, Lipitor, so the cost per unit is incredibly vaster.