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This and That
The saga of a hospital bill
By THOMAS MICHALSKI
Article published on Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2007 |
Guess why medical insurance is so high?
Try examining a typical hospital bill.
Always one to question costs, I have found duplicated charges on credit cards, unauthorized “auto club” fees on gasoline cards and tariffs for safes and even refrigerators on hotel bills.
My wife recently entered a major Pinellas County hospital. It was an overnight stay, about eight hours of which was waiting for a doctor to sign her release form.
They billed the insurance company $47,616.33!
That bothered me. So I wrote a letter to the hospital and requested a detailed invoice. That was on July 16.
No one called or wrote. On Aug. 1 I fired off a second letter. That, too, was ignored. They probably hoped that I’d go away. I didn’t. On Aug. 14 I wrote to the hospital’s president and CEO, warning that my next step would be to contact whatever state and/or federal agencies I needed for help to get the information.
That got their attention and I received the detailed invoice that required a medical dictionary to decipher. What I’d discovered was shocking.
They charged, for example, $40.12 for a 50 mg Cilostazol pill. That’s basically an aspirin for stent implantation patients. You can get 60 100 mg pills at a drug store for $89.99! They charged an unbelievable $8.02 for a common aspirin. A Darvocet-N tablet, a simple pain killer, billed out at $12.97 each.
It cost $14,153.12 for a brief operating room visit. The sterile supplies that mostly are reusable cost $5,824.87. The “observation bed” where patients stay for a brief time after an operation cost $621, a second “observation bed” was $828.
There were six pages of charges ranging from 12 cents for a 75 mg Clopidogrel tablet to thousands of dollars for things like an introducer sheath ($3,180), a micropuncture kit ($2,003) and a unilateral extremity ($4,675), to name just a few.
At the bottom of the invoice was printed, “A not-for-profit hospital licensed by the State of Florida.”
Not for profit! What would it have cost had the hospital been a profit-making facility?
Keep in mind, too, that all these charges were in addition to a steady flow of others from doctors and other professionals for what insurance didn’t cover. An insurance company form stated that any other billings need not be paid and if, in fact, they were, then a refund was due!
Now, here is the kicker! After questioning the original hospital bill I received a letter from the “director of operations” saying that the $47,616 invoice was being discounted by $31,283 That’s quite a “discount.” They reduced the original bill to $16,332, certainly a more reasonable but still excessive cost than the original.
You need to know that if you are responsible for a percentage of your bill, a hospital isn’t going to tell you that it settled for a discounted fee. If you ask, sure, they’ll own up. If you don’t, well, you get the picture.
So, folks, that is just one story of probably thousands. The lesson here is to religiously read medical bills, question them and then make noise.
It’s worth the effort because the bottom line is that we all pay higher premiums for those outrageous and questionable hospital invoices.
Until next time ...
Thomas Michalski is the editor of the Pinellas Park Beacon.
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Article published on Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2007
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