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from the there-should-be-an-app-for-that dept.
Fountain Valley resident Jennifer Moore makes a really good point.
"When you take your car to the mechanic, they give you a written estimate before they touch it," she told me.
"So why is it that when you go to the hospital, you have no idea how much something will cost until the bill arrives?"
Moreover, why are prices so completely different from one healthcare provider to another?
And why is it that when patients try to find out in advance how much something will cost, they're treated like unwelcome guests rather than equal partners in their own treatment?
[...] The near-total lack of transparency in healthcare pricing is a key reason we have the highest costs in the world — roughly twice what people in other developed countries pay.
Simply put, drugmakers, hospitals, labs and other medical providers face no accountability for their frequently obscene charges because it's often impossible for patients to know how badly they're being ripped off.
[...] Moore's insurer, Cigna, was charged $2,758 by the medical center for the two ultrasounds. However, Cigna gets a contractual discount of just over $1,000 because it's, well, Cigna. All insurers cut such sweetheart deals with medical providers.
That lowered the bill to $1,739. Cigna paid $500. That left a balance of $1,239, for which Mika was entirely responsible because she hadn't met her $1,250 deductible for the year.
Moore quickly ascertained online that the average cost for a pair of ultrasounds is about $500 — meaning the medical center's original $2,758 charge represented a more than 400% markup.
Cigna's lower contractual charge of $1,739 still meant the bill had been marked up more than 200%.
And the $1,239 Mika had to pay was more than twice the national average.
Wait, it gets even worse.
Moore said that after working her way through various levels of customer service in the medical center's billing department, she learned that the cash price for the two ultrasounds was $521.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-07-29/column-could-our-healthcare-system-be-any-dumber
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday August 03 2019, @03:43PM
I would NEVER shrug such a thing off. I was positively incensed the entire time. I seriously considered sending the doctor's office a bill for "account research," but I thought it was too unlikely that they would pay it. So, I just quit going to that doctor, after having a conversation with the billing person and my doctor about precisely why I was leaving. Most billing people aren't quite so incompetent, but the underlying problem is of course the overcomplicated system.
One surprising thing about this was that no one at any point said, "No big deal, you deal with it..." to me. At no point did the doctor's office object to refiling the claim several times. They were always polite to me, always promptly removed late charges from my bill when I requested a refiling (even though they ultimately didn't get their money until almost a year after the visit), and honestly I think the first incorrect filing started because they didn't look at my insurance in detail first and tried to code things in a way to SAVE me money. And the insurance people were polite and nice most of the time too.
It didn't make me any less angry about the whole thing, but actually -- with the exception of when I was refused billing codes -- everyone I interacted with was actually TRYING to help me resolve the issue. The problem was that the system was so insane that they couldn't communicate correctly to get it to work the right way.