Comment on If you receive a high medical bill, don't pay it immediately. Ask for an itemized bill first.
IWW4@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
The games that hospitals and medical providers play with bills is unreal. My wife and I had to manage cancer treatment for one of our family members and the amount of incorrect bills, redundant bills and deluge of documents that were sent were from the hospital and various providers was fucking insane.
Little did they know that my wife is a machine when it comes to organizing and dissecting information. She would routinely crush those fuckers on the bills they were sending. They tried to bill for the same procedure FOUR times!
If the person getting the treatment had to handle all those bills while being incapacitated withe chemo and pain management they would have been screwed hard.
I do not have any hard evidence that all of the above was by design or by errors in the system but it sure seemed intentional.
TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today 1 week ago
As a medical provider at a hospital I can attest that we really have little to no control over any of your medical billing. Not saying that mistakes don’t happen, we are dealing with tens of thousands of people and billing departments usually have a lot of employee turnaround.
That being said, the vast majority of things like duplicate bills, incorrect bills, and redundant documentation is a byproduct of dealing with private insurance companies.
Even if we’ve already done a prior authorization the insurance company can suddenly decide that we didn’t provide the exact right information, or that we didn’t have the right type of referral, or even used the wrong color of ink pen… They can deny a claim, which usually will prompt the billing department to automatically send you guys a bill. At which point you guys call us understandably upset, which prompts us to start the whole authorization process over again.
Dealing with Medicare and especially Medicaid is so easy compared to private insurance, as they have a very clear motive to erect as many reasons to deny or delay coverage as possible. The entire reason the American healthcare system is so archaic and management heavy is because we have to deal with private insurance.
I can guarantee the medical providers hate the situation more than anyone. The day after the United ceo got assassinated was one of the more jolly days I’ve seen at the hospital for years. It was almost unreal to hear my older and very uptight professional colleagues crack jokes about a man being murdered in provider meetings.