Life-saving rabies treatment can cost as much as $10,000 plus hospital fees

As if having a bat in your house isn’t bad enough, imagine the fright from a $6,017 emergency room bill for rabies treatment.

That was Ally McNamee’s experience, as reported by Vox.  She was shooing the creature from her house and the bat swatted her open mouth with a wing. She went to urgent care but was sent on to the emergency room – the only place that had the drugs to treat rabies.

The cost of the drug, immunoglobin, was $3,076, which it turns out is pretty low for hospitals. Some charge closer to $10,000, according to Vox’s research on emergency room bills.

A hospital near Denver billed $10,494 for the rabies drug, but in England, the same drug costs just $1,600. And Vox quoted one person as saying about the drug, “Rabies is 100 percent fatal. What are you going to do? Not get it?”

So count immunoglobin as yet another life-saving medication that pharmaceutical companies price sky high. And hospitals can add to the expense through emergency room facility fees, plus separate appointments for the series of four shots.

The health data firm Amino checked 45,000 claims for rabies treatment and found a range of bills, from $280 on the low end to as much as $9,912 on the high end, Vox reported. Those amounts were what consumers and insurers paid, not the hospital charges.

Ever had to get a rabies shot? Or had to pay sky-high costs for life-saving medication? Share your comments below.