Hospitals adding charge to bills from doctors’ offices, outpatient surgical clinics and diagnostic centers they own
Hospitals are gobbling up doctor’s offices – and they’re bringing higher prices to patients when they do, even if a patient never sets foot on a hospital campus.
Enter the “hospital facility fee”: a charge hospitals can add to bills from doctors’ offices, outpatient surgical clinics and diagnostics centers that they own, rebranding them as “outpatient hospital departments”, even if the facility is miles from a hospital campus.
“It’s one of the most egregious examples of hospital financing at the expense of consumers,” said Liz Hagan, director of policy solutions at the United States of Care, a non-profit advocacy group that released a new report on the practice.
The report, “Behind the Bill” argues that “hospitals are at the center of a massive market failure”, where consolidation is driving price hikes for patients.
US healthcare is extortion.
Give me all your money or I will let you die!
How dare you question my integrity as a Doctor!!!
It’s not the doctors. It’s their corporate overlords. Doctors are getting fucked by the system too. I have a friend that decided to become a doctor after already attending three years of college. By the time he was a resident, he realized he’d never be able to pay off his student loans with an internist’s income, and had to go back to med school for a specialty.
He also said that his first medical group was so scummy that they held regular meetings about the doctor’s reviews. No, not their treatment records or patient comments, the fucking reviews on ratemydoc and Google. Someone complained that he didn’t prescribe antibiotics even though the patient “knew” they had an infection, and the advisors straight up told him to prescribe them if someone asks for them moving forward. It’s fucking gross.
I am just a consumer of medicine, so this is second hand.
I live i a pretty big city that you have heard of.
We have two mega corporations that bought up the hospitals and then went for the doctors offices and specialties.
Let’s call them Corp A and Corp B.
Corp A was appreciably better in quality than Corp B but corporations are going to cut costs and race to the bottom.
The doctors in my city just quit and started their own companies. They are excellent.
Now Corp A has an excuse to focus on patient care and they are pretty dang good.
Corp B still sucks. I feel bad for the people who have to go there.
Been a minute since I posted this:
Frame Canada: Wendell Potter spent decades scaring Americans. About Canada. He worked for the health insurance industry, and he knew that if Americans understood Canadian-style health care, they might… like it. So he helped deploy an industry playbook for protecting the health insurance agency. https://www.npr.org/2020/10/19/925354134/frame-canada
Thank you
When I was young I broke my arm, my parents got charged for an overnight stay. I never stayed in any hospital room, I was treated through the emergency room and discharged maybe 5 hours later in the middle of the day.
We still refuse to go to that hospital or it’s associated hospitals all these years later
I am currently awaiting, from Amazon, a number of braces, knee, wrist, back, neck etc.
Being homeless for almost a year is not fun. Basically all of the tendons in my body are shot after walking around 2000 miles.
Why not go to a doctor?
Well, 1, I am in waaaay too much pain and can barely walk. Car got stolen long ago. No busses where I am.
2, it would take 6 weeks to wait for an appointment, where they would either tell me to see someone else (another 6 weeks), who might actually give me the same braces… or more likely I would be so exhausted from getting to the office I would not be able to adequately describe my symptoms in the 10 minutes the inevitably 45 minute late doctor would have to talk to me.
3, even with medicare, it would be far more expensive to pay the deductible and inflated costs from the medical industry as opposed to just buying the shit outright.
4, go to the ER? Even more expensive, and I’d be basically writhing in pain for hours as my injuries are not immediately life threatening, and be exposed to almost certainly actual biohazards from people with open wounds, communicable diseases and of course just violent and stupid people.
American healthcare is where it makes more sense to writhe in pain at home.
Can someone from a functioning country please adopt me or marry me or something so I can emigrate there?
Facility fees are awful, but the non-facility fees they’ll charge for explicitly outpatient treatment can be fuckinf insane.
The medical system in the US should not be called healthcare; it is a system that is designed to extract as much money as possible out of patients when they are least capable of fighting back. It’s cruel, and every lawmaker that opposes a nationalized or public system is complicit in the cruelty.
Our for-profit medical system is a crime against humanity.
