Steven Brill, a well-known American journalist who wrote the groundbreaking 2013 Time Magazine feature “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us”, has just released his newest book – a sequel of sorts to the Time article. “America’s Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix our Broken Healthcare System” attempts to explain how the Affordable Care Act, although clearly beneficial to numerous Americans, did not attempt to fix the real issue in America’s healthcare tragedy, which is the exorbitant amounts charged to patients by healthcare facilities.
To help him illustrate his point in the original Time article, Pat Palmer offered some of her expertise from more than 20 years of identifying and fighting fraudulent and erroneous medical billing charges. She had offered items of proof from clients that showed sky-high charges for common items and over-priced medications that cost the hospital far less than they were charged. Mrs. Palmer uncovered a niacin tablet on a patient’s bill in which the patient was charged $24 for a pill that cost the hospital about five cents each.
Although that’s quite a markup, she showed examples of some much more expensive errors on medical bills, such as instances of triple billing that added thousands of dollars to a patient’s hospital bill. These were items from a patient’s stay in the intensive care unit. Many items in the ICU are included in the charge for the room, which is why the charge for this area is almost always much more expensive than a traditional room in the hospital.
Palmer explains that it’s very common for a patient to be charged the daily room fee, a fee for a special kit for a procedure, then charged again separately for an item that is included in the kit, which is also included in the room charge.
This type of over-charging is very common in a hospital setting and often applies to operating room charges as well. However, consumers who don’t know to request a detailed itemized statement or who don’t know that these items are already paid for as part of the room charge might not ever know that they are being overcharged on their hospital bills.
Pat’s first piece of advice to anyone who has recently been discharged from a hospital is to request a detailed itemized statement from the facility’s billing department. The facility can’t refuse to give this to you – it is your right to receive it, but you must ask for it. Once you receive it, analyze it for anything that looks suspicious.
If you have a question about any charge – if you don’t know what it means or you don’t remember receiving the item or having the procedure done – question it. If you see a charge for some sort of “kit”, question that as well. Should the items in that kit have been part of the room charge? Are there additional charges somewhere on the bill for the individual components of that kit?
If you have difficulties reviewing your itemized statement or if you have trouble receiving the itemized statement from the billing department, contact the advocates at Medical Billing Advocates of America at (855) 203-7058 to help you understand your hospital bill and to make sure that you are only paying True and Accurate charges and Fair and Reasonable prices.
