71–80 of 202 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why is done that way? Lots of freelance chefs move between restaurants but the bill is always between the restaurant and the people who dine there.
Server is better analogy. The wage you pay/owe the waiter is direct and (mostly) separate from meal, albeit informal with only shame as a deterrent for default.
This seems like a good thread to mention the book "Never Pay The First Bill" by journalist Marshall Allen. I've worked in healthcare for 20+ years. I've been on the collecting side of many bills, it's a good book for patients. Contrary to popular belief most hospital systems are not evil profit seeking corpratons but just trying to keep the lights on, it's still a business though and as a patient you have the right a…
A lot of this has changed with the No Surprises Act, that specifically covers Emergency situations and others where a patient would be "reasonably expected" to believe that a service was in network. Surprise billing protections apply to most emergency services, including those provided in hospital emergency rooms, freestanding emergency departments, and urgent care centers that are licensed to provide emergency care.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because historically doctors were in private practices. I still am, as an anesthesiologist. Many of the surgeons I work with are also private. So, since neither of us is employed by the hospital, we do our own billing. If we were hospital employees, we could indeed do unified billing. That's a better analogy; your chefs are expecting to be paid by the restaurant, so it collects the bill. I am not paid by the hospital…
It's still better than billing to the hospital and the hospital billing to the patient, piling up taxes and comissions. The patient is also getting more cost transparency instead of a bundled bill one can never make sense of.
Obviously there are some practical limits in exceptional cases, but I can't think of another industry that has high-price services where providing estimates isn't standard.
This seems like a good thread to mention the book "Never Pay The First Bill" by journalist Marshall Allen. I've worked in healthcare for 20+ years. I've been on the collecting side of many bills, it's a good book for patients. Contrary to popular belief most hospital systems are not evil profit seeking corpratons but just trying to keep the lights on, it's still a business though and as a patient you have the right a…
Except you're tone deaf trivializing systemic evil as a banal "business misunderstanding". I was roadtripping through Redding, CA several years back. While in line at a coffee, I ran across a young lady with a nasal infusion pump tube taped to her face arranging some paperwork. After chatting, she informed me she had Stage IV cancer and the hospitals and doctors were coming after her for every cent she had while she…
Humans are chimps with high order skills to do the same chimp shit and explain it away with various fictions.
That has included me, in the past. It is stupid easy to accidentally have a debt to a hospital. For families, sensible privacy rules at clinics can mean that it is very hard to choke point bills to a single person. To the point that I asked every time if I owed money when I did checkups to be told that we did not. Only to later find that my family did, in fact, have a bill due. For a while. Recently I'm getting it wi…
That has included me, in the past. It is stupid easy to accidentally have a debt to a hospital. For families, sensible privacy rules at clinics can mean that it is very hard to choke point bills to a single person. To the point that I asked every time if I owed money when I did checkups to be told that we did not. Only to later find that my family did, in fact, have a bill due. For a while. Recently I'm getting it wi…
I've been getting those separate bills recently and it's driving me nuts. For one small out patient procedure I have received bills from the hospital, the doctor, the anesthesiologist, anesthesiologist nursing company, and a random surgeon I have never met that the doctor asked in for a 30 second consult (I know how long the procedure took) while I was under. Seriously considering ignoring some of these whotf-are-you…
Buried midway down, they mention that the commercial health plans available to people without conventional employers (Obamacare) can (and routinely do) set deductibles as high as $9,450. And that’s in addition to the premium-which, in New York City for example, starts at $618/month for the very worst plan for an individual. Sure, that’s subsidized for lower-income households — but who among those has a spare $10K lyi…
We should've gotten single payer. The insurance lobby is just too strong, I guess. In several recent years, I would've been better off not having insurance and paying out of pocket because I never (or just barely) hit the deductible. Even when my deductible was lower, if you added up my premiums against what was covered I still probably overpaid most years. So all I've been doing is subsidizing someone else's bills w…
I have been fighting these battles for much of the last ten years and this article fails to explain a dynamic that is happening here, at least where I am (california). I'll give my most recent thing that ended up in collections (which you can easily ignore, it doesn't affect your credit at all in some states). I had a pretty intensive surgery. I had a copay, which was shown to me before the surgery. I signed it, paid…
[0]https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/101-help/index.cfm
This seems like a good thread to mention the book "Never Pay The First Bill" by journalist Marshall Allen. I've worked in healthcare for 20+ years. I've been on the collecting side of many bills, it's a good book for patients. Contrary to popular belief most hospital systems are not evil profit seeking corpratons but just trying to keep the lights on, it's still a business though and as a patient you have the right a…
Why are they struggling so much more now than 10 or 20 years ago (when health care costs were already soaring)?
I read about a non-profit childrens hospital in some large US city that paid its CEO $7 million.