Money worries are real. From the cost of living crisis, which has meant some people going hungry and millions more struggling to pay their bills, to the constant high costs of healthcare, financial pressures burden almost everyone.
I still remember the tension and difficulty I faced with the cost of my appendectomy—and that was 20 years ago!
A recent newsletter from Bloomberg came my way today with some practical advice about medical bills that rings true to me. I will paste some of it below as a public service announcement and encourage you to contact The Company Chaplain for spiritual support to help cope with any worry, stress or difficulties you face in your life.
The first step when faced with any medical bill is to get an itemized version, rather than just a total amount due. The detailed list will show codes for the procedures a doctor or hospital is charging for. That’s where a lot of problems show up.
With an itemized bill, you can check the billing codes – a Google search usually yields a basic description – against the care you received. “Often those codes are inaccurate,” Allen said.
Sometimes they’re inflated to incur higher charges. For example, the code for the most complex type of emergency department visit, 99285, requires a comprehensive medical history, an extensive physical exam, and decision-making of “extreme complexity,” Allen said. It might be appropriate for someone arriving unconscious after a car crash or a drug overdose, but it’s often also billed for more routine encounters.
You can check the billing codes against your medical records, which, Allen notes, are created by clinicians with their licenses on the line. As a result, he said, doctors’ notes tend to be reliable. “It’s in the billing department that all the games happen,” he said.
After getting any unjustified billing codes removed, Allen said, patients can usually get a discount off prices that are inherently inflated.
“The magic words you should ask every time you get a medical bill are, Can I get a discount?” he said. Just asking can yield a discount of 20% or even 50%. That’s because there’s no limit on what medical providers can charge. “The prices are made up to begin with,” he said.
Hospitals accept far lower amounts than their list prices from insurance companies and from government programs like Medicare. But patients don’t always know that, and they don’t know they can ask.
Armed with a career’s worth of knowledge about the inner-workings of the health-care system, Allen wants to spread the wisdom widely, including to companies who pay a huge chunk of America’s health-care tab.
His lessons are worth attention as working Americans are choosing their benefits this fall – and watching premiums go up for 2024. The typical cost of employer coverage is now $24,000 a year for a family plan. That’s money coming out of our paychecks, off the bottom line of private companies, and from the taxpayers who fund public-sector employers.
“My real vision is to build this type of health literacy into every employer-sponsored health plan,” Allen said. “I reject all the rules that the health-care system has made to advantage itself.” —John Tozzi