I call bullshit on the $35 fee. Unless he has a roadside stand with no staff instead of a clinic, uses no numbing meds, doesn't have malpractice insurance, and reuses his scalpels. $5000 seems excessive but $35 sounds like straight bullshit.
Edit: Also he wouldn't be able to afford to stitch you up afterwards, and forget about sending the specimen to the lab to make sure he actually got all the cancer.
Likely the $35 doesn't include the cost of the office visit
Yeah, it's just the copay. Dishonest of them to compare the copay for the excision to the full cost of the surgery.
Ok, I looked it up now it makes more sense. The $5000 thing he's talking about is a surgery done to remove cancers from the face so you don't have to cut a big chunk out. Basically the surgeon takes a little out and there's a pathologist at the bedside doing real-time analysis of the specimens to make sure they get all the cancer with minimal loss of healthy tissue. The $35 is just the copay (but the surgeon probably still charges a few hundred to insurance for all the reasons I said in the first comment) for the simpler procedure where you just cut out a big chunk and send it to a lab where they check to make sure you got all the cancer. I could see people trying to push the more expensive procedure to make extra money (and more importantly to make sure you got all the cancer the first time so you don't get sued).
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