The Irrational World of Healthcare Billing
Saw this post on the DailyKos that just so perfectly illustrates the state of our healthcare system.
Jollygreen does a great job of breaking down his costs and pointing out how the hospitals have increased their chargemasters in an effort to drive up their reimbursement. To top it off, the hospitals are pushing through as many people as they want simply processing transaction with no regard for things in context such as sending the bill for an ultrasound along with the bill for the other services associated with the miscarriage of that child one week later.
This just underscores again what poor business people most healthcare companies are.
Their approach to smaller reimbursements is simply to increase the billing amount. The approach to dealing with them is to simply low-ball them. Go ahead. Call up the hospital billing office and ask for a discount. They did not feel bad about simply raising the price with no rationale as to the amount. You should not feel bad about not using any rational reason for the lower amount you want to pay.
Filed under Behind the Curtain, Healthcare, Insurance, change:healthcare
2 Comments »
Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!
I just got the bill from a radiologist, Dr. Peeter Jakobson M.D. who apparently practices from a digital screen in Alabama. He ‘read’ the digital images for a hospital in Florida, then submitted bills to me, and Blue Cross. Interestingly enough, Blue Cross ONLY allowed 25% of his claim, ($527 to read 2 CT scans and a plain Xray of the abdomen) leaving me with his request for $33.23 more!
Given that the total time spent by a competent radiologist to do this task would be no more than 10 minutes, and that he WAS paid $132 for those 10 minutes, this makes his hourly actual payment in the order of $700! Not bad, not bad at all. $5600 a day for an 8 hour day, $28K a week! No wonder radiologists and pathologists vie for the highest annual salary! (Pathologist gets $5 for every URINE DIP done in a hospital, even though it is done by the nurses!)
We need better than this. We’re wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on an unjust war, and can’t provide quality health care for our citizens at a reasonable cost.
Something is broken, and perhaps Obama can lead the way to fixing it.