It is possible to negotiate with hospitals on prices, but I’d assume it would take an incredible amount of legwork, cajoling, and for competition sake, your physician being on staff at a variety of facilities AND of course this could only happen with elective procedures, treatment and testing, contingent upon the degree of the illness and whether time is of the essence.
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It’s not what people want.
I know that.
Or, at least, it’s not what many people want. There are millions of people terrified of socialized medicine, rightly or wrongly. And I certainly won’t pretend the NHS is unremittingly brilliant. In many ways it’s not that far from the quality of care you’d get from the VA. But what Cameron and his cronies want to do to it will only make it worse
This Fox News(!) op ed is worth a read, though. Although the ‘improvement’ still seems a long way from acceptable to me.
I’m not even talking about haggling. I’m just talking about getting a straight answer on what something might cost before you agree to do it.
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I’ve tried this, sitting in front of account’s managers and asking for at least a ballpark figure on an outpatient surgical procedure. The answer is always the same – ‘Well, that depends…’. There’s a wall of hem-hawing non-answer, where they stubbornly refuse to be penned down to any figure. They do not want patients interjecting themselves in to the process of getting paid by the patient’s insurance companies; that effort alone is long, labor intensive and expensive for them. So, they maintain an attitude of willful ignorance and passive-aggressive (polite with a thin-lipped steely-eyed smile) non-compliance.
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Well yeah, of course not. What if you need a $40 tablet of aspirin during your stay. Of course that was sarcastic. You’d have to negotiate with everyone, since the docs bill separately, and get everything in writing. I don’t think it would be an easy task.
I know…can you imagine this practice being stood for anywhere else? Auto dealerships try this, which is why car salesmen are seen as unscrupulous. Heck, even lawyers will tell you their hourly rate ahead of time.
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I only wish that, even if we have to suck it up with private insurance, you could go to the national level to see and get insurance options. Some states have a scant number of insurance companies participating, so that’s a problem. We should really just move to a system like medicare for everyone. Everyone contributes, everyone gets the benefit at some point or another. I can’t get my insurance company to return calls, emails or to even transfer me to the right person. As to Obama care, I couldn’t and still can’t even register to look into options. I don’t like that you have to front load all the private info, where you may eventually determine that there’s nothing there for you.
There was a nice short piece on NPR today that mentioned the front-loading problem. I wonder if they can trash the current concept and make a more usable site, or if its a bad decision that we’ll be stuck with forever.
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I remember hearing a story on NPR sometime this year, where the person was talking about their experience in trying to get pricing on a procedure that they were paying for “out of pocket” – they weren’t very successful.
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And this is what else that is happening in this beautiful world of ours - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2013/06/03/cheap-test-with-vinegar-checks-for-cervical-cancer-seaweed-may-help-prevent-it/. Not $ 20 but a dab of vinegar.
When is America going to learn?
Nice article Maggie,
You may want to check out this technology. Approved in the EU and Canada, still waiting for the beholden FDA to approve.
Better clinical results than PAP and much less intrusive and less expensive
Hope this posts correctly, 1st time including a link in a comment.
I can only imagine the cost in the US.
You can also test if you are HPV- and skip the pap smear every other year if you have never had an iffy pap. Totally doing that.
What other industry basically gives you prices weeks, if not months AFTER you get the service? I’d love to see a Michael Moore-esque movie where someone walks into a hospital for various procedures and asks for a cost breakdown before they are even admitted. I’m curious as to if it’s even possible.
I did that. Had important surgery that was somewhat fungible in terms of scheduling. I called and called, trying to find out “how much will this cost me with the insurance plan I have, so I can tell whether I can afford to do this next month, or if I need to tough it out for a few months while I save up some cash?”
THEY COULD NOT TELL ME.
“It depends… on whether the hospital bills it as inpatient or outpatient… on who the anesthesiologist is that day and whether they’re in or out of your network… on which costs they choose to line item and which they roll into the surgery fee… on who assists and whether they bill separately or not…” and ON and ON and ON.
I made at least seven phone calls and could not, for love nor money, tell me what would be the final cost to me of a surgery that went by the books without any complications. “If I take my car in and they tell me that it needs a new fuel pump, they’ll quote me a price for the cost of the repair, providing that they don’t find something else wrong when they get in there. Surely you could do the same.” “Well, ma’am, you’re not a car” was the answer. !@$#@!$!#@
I just wanted to know… will this hit my deductible? Will it max out my Flexible Spending Account? Will it fit on my credit card? Can I pay it off in one chunk when I get the bill? When should I plan to even have the cash in hand? And they could answer none of those answers. Not the insurance company, the surgeon, the hospital, nobody.
I had the surgery in September 2012. I finished out my FSA for the year without ever hearing back from the hospital other than the initial bill showing that they’d billed my insurance.
I got a bill last week. Far too late to submit to my 2012 FSA if I even had any money left in it.
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