I'd be happier to see regulated business practices. While I agree that the prices are a problem, I've felt more pain from bills that keep coming in for more than a year after a major event. And when I go to complain, they say that someone made a mistake, the insurance took a long time to respond, or some other excuse. Give me a final bill with all charges within 30 days, then 30 more days to resolve any issues with that bill, and then let the billing end so we can move on with our financial lives without wondering if one more bill is going to show up next week, tied to my credit record.
One thing that troubles me, is the hospital near me does the same thing, but "consoladates the bill". This literally is just a never ending fee that increases and they never list for what.
Every single month I call and they give me the run-around. After 6 months of this, I have yet to pay the full bill until they mail me an itemized list and without fail it's wrong. I contact them, they remove two or three charges, I ask them to mail me the updated one. They do, then next month I receive a bill for those proceedures they removed the last time.
Its to the point every month my bill now goes from $0 to ~$800, then back to $0 by the end of the month. Unfortunately, they now called and threaten the ~$800 "over due bill" to collection's. Luckily, I've recorded and documented everything, so I got it removed (again).
However, I'm just waiting for this to go to collection's at some point, even though I owe zero at the end of every month. I'm 90% sure this is a bug in their system, but I can't seem to get around it.
Having worked for a medical billing office, I hate to say it, but this is the norm. The billing office is often not officially the hospital or medical practice. Although we got all the records, we never really interacted and it was just files on a computer. I used to do write-offs, which was basically taking $10m a day and just clicking "don't need to pay". Usually it was dead people, poor, etc. At least that part of the job seemed somewhat nice.
I currently use hospital billing as an example when explaining the halting problem. You’re never sure if you’ve paid off an incident or if another bill will show up in a few months...
Before we were married my wife had an MRI. Having not met her deductible they sent her a bill for 1.5k. Not ideal but we were able to afford it and paid the bill. 364 days later we received another bill for roughly the same. We thought there was an error. After months of back and forth, even after they had told us for 2months that “they took care of it and we would not be charged” we ended up having to pay another $500. This whole process was beyond infuriating.
The other bill apparently came from the Dr who read the MRI. The fun part was we were never contacted by that Dr about the results. She eventually left the hospital and she canceled our follow up appointment.
The part I love is when the insurance company points the fingers at the clinic, and clinic points fingers at insurance for how long the whole thing takes, meanwhile I get sent to collections.
/now I pay a few dollars (no matter if I owe something or if they owe me) near the end of the 90 days those two companies have to figure out how much I owe so I don't have to deal with collections.
Think that a provider gets that billing cycle as well. Every patient that has insurance means the provider needs to collect from 2 different agencies: through the credit card in a copay and through the insurance, that fights the price.
I've heard of why the insurance companies usually take a while, something to do with HIPAA and some insurance companies being bought out, so now they have to forward information back and forth, all whilst remaining compliant. At least something along those lines is what someone from HR at my company (not related to the medical industry) was telling us one time. I wasn't able to find a good article on it though sadly.
