The Cost of Not Getting Tested for Coronavirus: A $10K ER Bill

Post by bluntfang » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 1:11 AM UTC

ska wrote: post #122

bluntfang wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think current health care is giving accurate line items on your bill?

Accurate or not clinician time is typically billed separately, as are drugs, individual procedures, equipment, etc. Some stuff is rolled up but not that much; hospital accounting systems are quite comprehensive and structured in such a way to help them argue with insurance companies. So the argument that the crutch is expensive because an MD handed it to you probably doesn't hold, the clinician files something, proba…

Post by ska » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 2:29 AM UTC

bluntfang wrote: post #151

ska wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accurate or not clinician time is typically billed separately, as are drugs, individual procedures, equipment, etc. Some stuff is rolled up but not that much; hospital accounting systems are quite comprehensive and structured in such a way to help them argue with insurance companies. So the argument that the crutch is expensive because an MD handed it to you probably doesn't hold, the clinician files something, proba…

I never said it was the only reason. The reason it costs so much is because you aren't paying for the raw material. You're paying for a service. That service happens to be laughably bad and expensive, but that's what you're paying for.

Post by beckler » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 5:02 AM UTC

karatestomp wrote: post #57

aurelwu wrote: post #19

The statement from the hospital management boggles my mind: "In addition, there are different parts to a patient bill. One part is what the hospital charges the insurance company, one part is what the insurance company eventually pays [...]" I can't think of any other business transaction where someone just puts a giant number on a bill and then is happy if someone pays ~25% of it. Such companies would be shunned by…

Nothing about hospital billing would fly anywhere else. Bills just showing up after the fact with little ability to verify their accuracy, constant errors one can catch anyway (so how many are missed?), bills showing up months later from a half-dozen different sources when you only had one apparent "vendor", and so on. I bet we received between 100 and 200 pieces of mail for each of our kids' births, including matern…

Post by nojvek » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 5:11 AM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #126

______---______ wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Guess which country has better health outcomes. The US, by all objective measures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_quality_o... It's actually not uncommon for Brits to travel to America to pay for treatments not available on the national health or to avoid the often years-long waiting lists.

40 million Americans don't have healthcare[1], and another 38 million have "inadequate" health care[2]. Together that's more than the entire population of the UK. It's not so impressive that if you only treat the richest with the best jobs who can afford the best treatments, you get better outcomes than systems which treat everyone. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/16/americans-without-health-ins... [2] https://www.p…

Post by karatestomp » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 5:31 AM UTC

beckler wrote: post #155

karatestomp wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing about hospital billing would fly anywhere else. Bills just showing up after the fact with little ability to verify their accuracy, constant errors one can catch anyway (so how many are missed?), bills showing up months later from a half-dozen different sources when you only had one apparent "vendor", and so on. I bet we received between 100 and 200 pieces of mail for each of our kids' births, including matern…

I found a bill with a mistake on it, as one of my kids was charged twice for a single procedure. I called to get it fixed, but instead of dealing with it they just immediately sent it to collections.