Posted on 09/21/2014 7:24:21 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The next time you visit a hospital, it is your wallet that may end up hurting the most. All over the United States, it has become common practice for hospitals to wildly inflate medical bills. For example, it has been reported that some hospitals are charging up to 30 dollars for a single aspirin pill. And as you will see below, some victims report being billed tens of thousands of dollars for a non-surgical hospital visit that lasts only a few hours. When something is seriously wrong with us, most of us never stop to ask our health professionals how much it will cost to actually treat us. In that moment, we are desperate and we just want someone to help us. Many doctors and hospitals take full advantage of this by billing their "customers" as much as they feel they can possible get away with. It is a legal scam that is bilking ordinary Americans out of billions of dollars every single year.
Over the weekend, the New York Times reported on one case that is a perfect example of the outrageous medical billing that I am talking about...
Before his three-hour neck surgery for herniated disks in December, Peter Drier, 37, signed a pile of consent forms. A bank technology manager who had researched his insurance coverage, Mr. Drier was prepared when the bills started arriving: $56,000 from Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, $4,300 from the anesthesiologist and even $133,000 from his orthopedist, who he knew would accept a fraction of that fee.
He was blindsided, though, by a bill of about $117,000 from an “assistant surgeon,” a Queens-based neurosurgeon whom Mr. Drier did not recall meeting.
“I thought I understood the risks,” Mr. Drier, who lives in New York City, said later. “But this was just so wrong — I had no choice and no negotiating power.”
The practice known as "drive-by doctoring" has gotten completely and totally out of control.
All over America, doctors are popping into surgeries or are stopping by to talk to another doctor's patients for a few minutes and are charging thousands of dollars for this "assistance".
It is a morally reprehensible scam that needs to be stopped.
Another thing that needs to be stopped is the practice that many hospitals have of billing patients for emergency medications at a rate that is thousands of times over cost.
For example, just check out what happened when 52-year-old Marcie Edmonds went in to a hospital in Arizona to get treated for a scorpion sting...
With the help of a friend, she called Poison Control and was advised to go to the nearest hospital that had scorpion antivenom, Chandler Regional Medical Center. At the hospital, an emergency room doctor told her about the antivenom, called Anascorp, that could quickly relieve her symptoms. Edmonds said the physician never talked with her about the cost of the drug or treatment alternatives.
Her symptoms subsided after she received two doses of the drug Anascorp through an IV, and she was discharged from the hospital in about three hours.
Weeks later, she received a bill for $83,046 from Chandler Regional Medical Center. The hospital, owned by Dignity Health, charged her $39,652 per dose of Anascorp.
Did that hospital actually need to charge that much?
Of course not.
Hospitals down in Mexico only charge $100 per dose of Anascorp.
And anyone that has ever been in for major surgery knows how outrageous some of these hospital bills can be.
For instance, consider the experience of an NBC News reporter that chose to have neck surgery for degenerative disc disease....
Once I got my itemized bill, the grand total was a little over $66,013.40! That was for a one night stay and a four level vertebrae fusion surgery. The charges included $22 for one sleeping pill, $427 for one dissecting tool, and $32,000 for four titanium plates and ten screws.
I brought it to Todd Hill, a fee based patient advocate who helps people decipher their medical bills. "The screws in your procedure were billed at $605 a piece for a total of $6050 dollars. We've seen those in our past research for $25 or $30," he said. "In this case, the markup is tremendous," he added.
One of the primary reasons why so many Americans die completely broke is because medical bills can run up to astronomical heights if you happen to have a terminal illness.
For example, a while back Time Magazine reported on one cancer patient in California that had run up nearly a million dollars in hospital bills before he died...
By the time Steven D. died at his home in Northern California the following November, he had lived for an additional 11 months. And Alice had collected bills totaling $902,452. The family’s first bill — for $348,000 — which arrived when Steven got home from the Seton Medical Center in Daly City, Calif., was full of all the usual chargemaster profit grabs: $18 each for 88 diabetes-test strips that Amazon sells in boxes of 50 for $27.85; $24 each for 19 niacin pills that are sold in drugstores for about a nickel apiece. There were also four boxes of sterile gauze pads for $77 each. None of that was considered part of what was provided in return for Seton’s facility charge for the intensive-care unit for two days at $13,225 a day, 12 days in the critical unit at $7,315 a day and one day in a standard room (all of which totaled $120,116 over 15 days). There was also $20,886 for CT scans and $24,251 for lab work.
The sad truth is that the U.S. health care system has become a giant money making scam, and all of us are the victims.
Those that work in this industry should be greatly ashamed for what they are doing to us.
Just consider the following numbers...
-It has been estimated that hospitals in the United States overcharge their patients by about 10 billion dollars every single year.
-Medical bills are the number one reason why Americans file for bankruptcy. One study found that approximately 41 percent of all working age Americans either have medical bill problems or are currently paying off medical debt.
-According to a report published in The American Journal of Medicine, medical bills cause more than 60 percent of the personal bankruptcies in the United States.
-Health insurance is not nearly as much protection as you might think. According to a report published in the American Journal of Medicine, of all bankruptcies caused by medical debt approximately 75 percent of the time the people actually did have health insurance.
-Hospitals are not shy about sending debt collection agencies after people with unpaid medical bills. In fact, collection agencies seek to collect unpaid medical bills from approximately 30 million Americans every year.
-Back in 1980, less than 10 percent of U.S. GDP went to health care. Today, about 18 percent of U.S. GDP goes toward health care.
-If the U.S. health care system was a nation, it would be the 6th largest economy on the entire planet.
Does anyone out there have any doubt that the system is completely broken?
Please share this article with as many people as you can. Hospitals all over America are brazenly ripping us off, and we need to stand up and say that enough is enough.
The sad thing is this is really nothing new.
My daughter was born in 1998. I received a bill from the hospital on the day she turned 1 month old for every single thing imaginable in regard to the birth of a child - including the private room I never did get - with a notation that my insurance claim had been denied the week before.
I called the insurance company and they informed me they had received the claim from the hospital the day before (6 days AFTER the hospital bill said it was denied) and had been paid the same day I received the hospital bill.
I won’t even go into the run around I got from the hospital billing department when I called them back - needless to say, I never got another bill about it :-)
I have a cousin who really did work for the CIA and is also a Physician.
I was talking to him at a family reunion and he said he could not get into a medical school in the U.S. so he attended one in the Caribbean. I guess he still had to pass the exam tho. Not sure why he couldn’t get into an American medical school because he sure is intelligent.
It is indeed.
Hospitals get audited by cpa firms working for the govt. The firm’s get paid a percentage of what they find. They find all kinds do of stuff but most of it is baseless and is later reversed.
We always had Blue Cross and Blue Shield while Daddy worked for civil service. It always paid 100% of any medical bills.
I think it must have been the early 80s when they started only paying a portion, I think due to the rapidly increasing charges by Dr.s and Hospitals.
At least I have decent pre-Obamacare insurance at this point which means the immediately knock 50 to 80 percent off the charge, pay a bit of that, and leave me holding the bag for a so-far bearable amount.
The worst scam I’ve seen around here is one of the hospital chains which is in-network for most of the insurance companies, but contracts with an ER doctors group that’s not in-network for anyone. So while the hospital ER charges are hammered down to reasonable levels, the doctors get paid their full billing, and in most cases the insurance company won’t cover since it is ‘out of network’.
I get off the Ayn Rand bandwagon at that point.
#2) Don't ever call an ambulance for any reason if you are ambulatory and can be driven by a friend or family member.
#3) Nothing good happens past midnight.
#4) Never be alone in a room with a priest, minister, or rabbi.
#5) Never go to bed angry with your spouse of children. End it and move on.
#6)Only drink wine or beer with family meals, and children should be included in this rule. Cocktail hour is for adults and should begin two hours before dinner and as soon as arriving home from work.
Rules from my grandmother
Is he a white male? That might explain his admission difficulties.
I understand that. Unconscious at the time the call was made. Told them not to call, but they ignored it when confronted with a body on the floor.
I had an endoscopy done while I was in grad school. It was the first time in my life that I had been without insurance.
The Surgeon removed a small non cancerous growth and the bill was not very high. I think it was $600. I was living hand to mouth and began paying them $20 a month. I finally got it down to only $40. I had two more payments left when they turned it over to a collection agency. The amount was so small that they didn’t even try to collect but it went on my credit as unpaid.
The hospital would not even take my payments after that so they never got paid the last $40. How stupid can you get?
Such nonsense. This article is clear indication that the author has NO idea of how supplies are stocked for hospitals....the patient has to have one, the stores in the hospital has to have one, and the supply chain has to have one for immediate replacement.
Moreover charges are distributed away from those without insurance to those with insurance or the ability to pay....so essentially several patients may actual be covering costs for several others.
This is not an effort by hospitals to some how reap ‘profits’ by ‘hiking’ prices....This has been the pricing structure for hospitals at least since 1920.
I have no idea what he scored but just from talking to him I would have guessed he was at least as intelligent as I am and I scored just under 1500 on the GRE. I had the highest score in my department in grad school.
Obamacare would be quite willing to give these kids morphine and let them die in order to bend down the cost curve of Obamacare. Under 14 or over 60, you're in trouble. The group in the middle will get treatment. This is the Emanuel Plan on cost containment in American medicine.
This has been happening ever since most of us stopped paying directly for medical care. It’s not news.
I’ve seen the scam on a smaller scale. I sleep with a CPAP. A few months ago I needed a new mask, so I called the medical supply company that sold me the machine. The mask was $150, with all but $40 covered by my insurance. My mask was shot, so I bought it. On a whim I searched the internet for CPAP supplies - I can buy that same mask without insurance involvement for $30. So the extra $110 is pure skim-off.
I am quoting from a recent Medicare B supplement bill:
Outpatient procedure: Hospital billed Medicare $3150.00, a ridiculous amount given the procedure.
Medicare approved $383.02.
Medicare paid $277.72.
The Medicare supplement paid $105.30.
I’d never had this procedure. It involved some pretty high tech equipment and somebody specially trained to run the equipment.
The procedure took about 20 minutes. I’d say a fair price for the service received would be $500.
They thought I was crazy until I explained their hospital wasn’t big enough to hold all the people who sent me an invoice.”
I had cataract surgery this last spring at an out-patient surgical center in Houston. During the weeks following the first surgery I received eight different bills from eight different groups who all claim they had a part in my surgery. After the second surgery the number increased to eleven. Just ridiculous.
From what I know, the interview process is key. This kid was a liberal from University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was telling me that a lot of admissions are in limbo until Obamacare and it’s uncertainties shake out. Both med schools and their students need a ten year plan in order to see where the train is going, who’s on it, and where /if it’s gonna wreck?
Even if your hospital is in network you can still get dinged by out of network ER docs, anesthesiologists, etc
The one in our city is awful for that. If we have a nonife threatening medical emergency we drive to another hospital an hour away or do battle with insurance company for months to get reimbursed.
I wish things could be more streamlined. I would love to see more free market solutions like the kiosks some states have in drugstores where if you have something minor like a UTI or sinus infection you can see a NP for a small fee get your meds and go home. Things like that could really cut costs. I’m sure solutions like this might keep a lot of people out of ERs that go there for little things.
Boutique health care-pay a doctor a premium and see free-something like that but the powers that be don’t want free market solutions.
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