Hospital Chains Find New Way To Gouge?

How can it be legal for hospitals to add “BILLIONS in ‘facility’ fees for routine care” onto patients’ bills … even if they didn’t go to the hospital but simply went to a satellite clinic?

Apparently, they can and ARE getting away with it as reported by the WSJ, which found a growing number of “unsuspecting patients find themselves at the mercy of institutions tacking on [aka padding] the bills.” In short, as hospitals buy up medical groups & turn them into their own “outpatient care centers,” people are getting a bill from the medical group, then, another & perhaps bigger one for “use of facility” from the hospital that owns them. Notes, the WSJ, the two-fer fee system “raises prices by hundreds of dollars for widely used & standard medical care, including colonoscopies, Mammograms & heart screening.”

Well, if the double whammy is legal, the added costs aren’t justified, at least, so say physicians & economists interviewed. And, everybody’s a loser, except of course the eye gougers. Medicare advisers, e.g., “said last year the federal insurer likely overpaid for a sample of services by about $6 billion because of the fees in 2021. “You’re not getting anything extra,” said health economist Loren Adler who studies hospital billing. Natch, the hospitals are blaming “federal regulations” that have upped their costly red tape if not their medical care game; they also mumble something about expensive new therapies that need to be subsidized SOMEHOW. Replied a pissed patient, Kelly Ebel: “Quit gouging us.”

Davd Soul