Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
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Incentives matter- and as long as the patient is not the customer, the incentive is that this nonsense will be normal. Unfortunately your doctor would look at you like you’re nuts if you said you would shop around for your own urine test, but that’s why this continues.
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Yeah, no kink shaming. Lest someone yuck your yum.
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They prefer to call it “aspirational pricing”.
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Ass-covering is the only way I see that chart to be relevant. I think the doc should pay for his own ass-covering.
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There’s a chain of local for-profit hospitals here that take no in network insurance and charge unbelievable prices. One made the news for charging a man $17,000 for five sutures. The good news is I have it from an inside source that they never send a bill to collections.
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Well, I’m sure he didn’t even say what it was for. So the idea that this test, given without informed consent, with no benefit to the actual patient, is something the patient is stuck with is absolutely absurd.
@agies Except that they didn’t just test for opioids, and the patient knows what drugs they (aren’t) taking, so…
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One’s wallet sure ends up aspirated.
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Because somewhere in one of the adhesion contracts you signed because you need care for a medical emergency and don’t have time to be fucking around negotiating says “I agree I’m responsible for all costs the hospital chooses to bill.”
Who will no doubt respond by buying stock in Sunset Labs.
God Bless Texas.
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That’s interesting. So when the park service calls an ambulance for my minor son even though he doesn’t really need it, and it charges $1,000, am I really not liable since no one signed a contract who was legally able to?
Since hospitals are legally required to treat Indigent emergency cases, people should routinely refuse to sign these open ended forms. I’ve also been in the hospital and an attending pokes his head in and charges you an out-of-network consultant fee. Next time I’m inpatient I’m going to have a sign on the door saying “if you’re not in network with my insurance stay the fuck out”
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bastards. And yet, right wingers still seem to get irked about SNAP “fraud.”
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Once a thing becomes a profit center by means of legislation removing regulation from it, the task for “free enterprise” is in finding ways to extract as much money as possible from the thing.
Which is great, if you are the person making the profit. Not so good if the thing is a lifesaving thing that leaves you penniless.
Fucking America and its culturally-ingrained profit motive.
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I’d have to concur. The money involved is so excessive one almost has to presume collusion.
Since employers and governments routinely test tons of people for stuff like this and I know they sure aren’t paying seventeen grand a person it stinks on high.
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I went to a pain specialist and had to do a pee test at every appointment. It was one of the conditions of them seeing me. Totally worth it though. That guy knew what he was doing.
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some people go into health care in order to assist people at their most desperate. And others go into health care in order to take advantage of people at their most deperate.
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I agree: greatest damn country on earth.
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Yes you are. Unless calling the ambulance was obviously unreasonable, or the bill was unreasonable for the service provided. $1000 for an ambulance visit is kind of crazy but almost certainly within the typical range. You could certainly argue that providing the service was unreasonable, but for medical issues that is going to be a tough argument. Its the same thing if you are an adult that is injured and unable to consent or refuse. You don’t need a written contract if it is reasonable to assume you need the service and unreasonable to get agreement from a legal guardian before providing it.
The hospital doesn’t even really need that stipulation in their contracts. It is implied by you coming to them for medical service that they will provide care to you as needed, that you agree to pay for it, and that in some cases they won’t be able to ask before providing a specific bit of care. They just want to explicitly state it in the contract to reduce the odds of having to litigate whether a particular service was necessary or the cost reasonable.
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What is curious is that, in other contexts, this sort of behavior would be treated as pretty stock invoice fraud(aside from any action an ideal world’s medical licensure association might want to take about the whole ‘medically unnecessary test ordered on a patient without their consent’ thing; which should probably be good for some punishment even if it doesn’t turn out that kickbacks were involved).
It’s not a new strategy; the USPS had to have a law put in place to deal with the strategy of 'mail somebody some piece of junk unsolicited then demand payment for it at an exorbitant rate).
One wonders(aside from the usual “because we can; and Respectable Businessmen do”) how this sort of thing remains tolerated in medicine. Even if, in this case, the tests had been through an in-network entity and the patient wasn’t stuck with a massive out-of-pocket it’d still be a scam; and unlike garden variety invoice creativity there is also the medical ethics problem presented by the fact that rendering services without a patient’s consent is often bad conduct even before financial considerations get into it.
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New York (since 2015) and California (since last July) both have “surprise bill laws” to address just the problem of hospital consultants being out of network. As far as I know, no insurer has even tried to advance the claim that for a state to regulate medical practice within its borders is in any way an overstep under the Commerce Clause - and, absent conflicting federal regulation, I’d hope that the ridiculous argument would be laughed out of court (since it would set a precedent that says that state governments have no power whatever to legislate).
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