Heard on The Doctors: "biopsy a wallet"

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Sat Apr 20 23:06:06 UTC 2013


"I'm not going to _biopsy a_ patient's _wallet_ before I treat him."

Not in Google or UD, but "wallet biopsy" gets 252 Ghits and UD has the
relevant definition from June 21, 2009:

A _wallet biopsy_ involves an inquiry similar to that of the regular biopsy ...
except that, in the _wallet biopsy_, the goal is to determine the ability
of the patient to pay for the medical care which the doctor might
recommend. The results of the wallet biopsy will reveal the nature and
extent of the patient's health insurance coverage and/or the extent of the
patient's personal wealth so that the doctor will know whether or not the
patient can afford to pay for the procedure.

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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