Skip to main content

Medical bills: why are these completely inscrutable and full of mistakes?

Within the last two days I received a bill for my glasses and read a post by a friend ranting about medical billing mistakes. This is a huge problem that is so common that it could be considered the norm. It is ridiculously expensive and could probably be fixed.

My exposure to medical bills has been through patients who show them to me, hoping I can make sense of them, my occasional foray into the world of being a healthcare consumer and the woes of friends and family. I can say, with confidence, that I have never read a medical bill that I understood. When I do choose to dig a bit deeper, overcharging and errors are more common than not.

It is very hard to get good statistics on this, but the lower end of what I'm seeing suggests that one in 10 bills contain errors. It's probably higher than that.

Common billing errors include being billed for procedures that were cancelled, being billed twice for the same thing, under different names, being billed for a more complex version of what was actually done and being billed for more time than was actually spent. How do these happen? In general the errors aren't deliberate fraud. Frequently staff in the billing office do not talk to doctors but produce bills based on what the doctors write. Doctors don't document what happened right away if they are busy and so by the time they do make a note, details are often fuzzy. In the case of billing for canceled procedures, the only paper trail available to billers may be the order for the test, and the cancellation may have been communicated by voice, on the fly. When doctors do bill for themselves, it may be difficult to find the correct code, so, in a hurry, we just settle on the first one that resembles what we did. Most of us are not interested in getting better at billing because we hate it. We weren't trained to do it and it takes us away from patient care.

Patients often (but certainly not always) know what did happen. Their bills, though, are written in some long forgotten Martian dialect which makes it really difficult to correct the errors.

My bill for glasses, which turns out to have been correct (after two phone calls) is a good example of what is wrong with medical bills. I apparently owed $137 for "lens sphcyl bifocal 4.00d/0.1, and $155 for "progressive lens per lens" and also more money for "lens polycar or equal" (which I would have assumed was my lens sphcyl, but I guess not), also the anti reflective coating and a miscellaneous vision service and a miscellaneous product which apparently meant that they charged to drill a hole in the lens and polish it. Sales tax I could figure out on my own. Also the bill didn't say anything about insurance, which does pay some portion, and the biller was not planning to submit it. A separate bill has arrived detailing the cost for my exam, also written in some language that I don't speak. The bills are dated a week apart, for unclear reasons. Theoretically I should be pretty well positioned to understand this sort of thing, after 3 decades in the medical field. I'm guessing others, who might be less educated, sicker, more fatigued or less assertive would simply give up and not check the bill at all.

My friend's issue was being billed for copays that he actually paid at the time of service, then getting notices that he was delinquent for not paying them, having to call the billing office multiple times and eventually having to appear in person in order to get it fixed.

Because billing in excess of services usually leads to making more money, there is no real economic incentive to do this right. A responsive and intelligent problem solver in the billing office may actually lose the practice money, if he or she uses the relevant skills to solve customer complaints. The only economic reason to reduce inadvertent overbilling is to avoid being caught and penalized by insurance companies. There are definitely medical billing specialists who delight in doing their jobs accurately, but there is no cash reward for this sort of behavior.

The most effective first step toward taking care of the problem would be a requirement (it could even be a law) that medical bills be descriptive enough that regular people can actually understand them. The affordable care act made health insurance companies describe their services in ways that average people could know what they were buying. If people could actually read and understand their bills, they could see if they were correct. We could even tack on to the law a time limit for resolution of a query. Wouldn't it be sweet if a billing question would be fielded in 24 hours and resolved in a week? That doesn't sound too difficult.

The whole issue of medical billing is, of course, wrong in a very big way, since its existence is based on fee for service. As long as providers can make more money for doing more things and more complex and difficult things, their will be economic pressure to do more intense medicine on more people, thus creating more people who have been medicalized into being sick. We do, though, have fee for service medicine at present, so it's time to support the (not yet written) "Medical Bill
Clarity Act of 2015."

Comments

David said…
If you are not buying your glasses from Zenni, you are paying too much. I get my eyes checked annually by an opthamologist and if the prescription changes, I order new glasses from Zenni.com. About 10 years ago, the eye glass shop in an optometrists office charged me over $600 for my lineless progressive lenses and eye glass frames.

A few weeks ago, I bought titanium frams and the same lineless progressive lenses, except with a higher refractive index so the lenses are tinner, for $100.

And I have Zenni has never made a billing error either.
herbert said…
I think you were gouged on the glasses... esp if that was a +4.00 (not a -4.00) and you have wire frames (which I'm guessing was the reason for the drilled hole). That was also steep for the "progressive" bifocals (which I went through with my local practitioner about 5 months ago, point by point).

Here's a helpful website about the polycarbonate or 'other' choices:
http://blog.cochranefamilyeyecare.com/2012/08/24/plastic-vs-polycarbonate-lenses-which-are-better/

MY problem is with the multiple ways that procedures can be described. There really needs to be as much UNIFORMITY- including the #s for billing codes- as possible. As a poor hippie tightwad that takes NOTHING for granted (in economic issues) I have scrutinized my bills and those of others... parents and (grown) children, and also grand-children. It's not a rewarding pastime... but is a result of living by
"when in doubt, do without" for so many years... which has made living in poverty endurable (if not fashionable). ^..^

Popular posts from this blog

How to make your own ultrasound gel (which is also sterile and edible and environmentally friendly) **UPDATED--NEW RECIPE**

I have been doing lots of bedside ultrasound lately and realized how useful it would be in areas far off the beaten track like Haiti, for instance. With a bedside ultrasound (mine fits in my pocket) I could diagnose heart disease, kidney and gallbladder problems, various cancers as well as lung and intestinal diseases. Then I realized that I would have to take a whole bunch of ultrasound gel with me which would mean that I would have to check luggage, which is a real pain when traveling light to a place where luggage disappears. I heard that you can use water, or spit, in a pinch, or even lotion, though oil based coupling media apparently break down the surface of the transducer. Or, of course, you can just use ultrasound gel. Ultrasound requires an aqueous interface between the transducer and the skin or else all you see is black. Ultrasound gel is a clear goo, looks like hair gel or aloe vera, and is made by several companies out of various combinations of propylene glycol, glyce

Ivermectin for Covid--Does it work? We don't know.

  Lately there has been quite a heated controversy about whether to use ivermectin for Covid-19.  The FDA , a US federal agency responsible for providing unbiased information to protect people from harmful drugs, foods, even tobacco products, has said that there is not good evidence of ivermectin's safety and effectiveness in treating Covid 19, and that just about sums up what we truly know about ivermectin in the context of Covid. The CDC, Centers for Disease Control, a branch of the department of Health and Human Services, tasked with preventing and treating disease and injury, also recently warned  people not to use ivermectin to treat Covid outside of actual clinical trials. Certain highly qualified physicians, including ones who practice critical care medicine and manage many patients with severe Covid infections in the intensive care unit vocally support the use of ivermectin to treat Covid and have published dosing schedules and reviews of the literature supporting it for tr

Old Fangak, South Sudan--Bedside Ultrasound and other stuff

I just got back from a couple of weeks in Old Fangak, a community of people living by the Zaraf River in South Sudan. It's normally a small community, with an open market and people who live by raising cows, trading on the river, fishing and gardening. Now there are tens of thousands of people there, still displaced from their homes by the civil war which has gone on intermittently for decades. There are even more people now than there were last year. There is a hospital in Old Fangak, which is run by Jill Seaman, one of the founders of Sudan Medical relief and a fierce advocate for treatment of various horrible and neglected tropical diseases, along with some very skilled and committed local clinical officers and nurses and a contingent of doctors, nurses and support staff from Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders, also known as MSF) who have been helping out for a little over a year. The hospital attempts to do a lot with a little, and treats all who present ther