American hospitals are fleecing patients out of billions of dollars annually, and experts say that while some of the overcharges are honest errors, many are deliberate.
That’s because hospital bills are next to impossible for consumers to understand, which means hospitals can hide improper charges behind mysterious medical terminology and baffling codes.
That’s what Nora Johnson found when her 56-year-old husband, Bill, underwent hip-replacement surgery in 1999. The cost of the operation was $25,000.
Knowing that her family would have to pay a percentage of the costs, she requested an itemized bill.
$129 for a box of tissues
“What I got was five feet of single-spaced names and codes,” recalls Johnson. Written in “hospital-speak,” some of it made sense, she says, while some of it was absurd. “Like the charge for newborn blood tests and a crib mobile. That stopped me in my tracks,” recalls Johnson. “As far as I know, my husband never had a baby.”
Johnson, from Caldwell, W.Va., was so shocked by the overcharges she became a trained medical billing advocate. Today, she audits hospital bills for consumers and for state employees in West Virginia.
“More than 90% of the hospital bills I’ve audited have gross overcharges,” says Johnson.
Estimates on hospital overcharges run up to $10 billion a year, with an average of $1,300 per hospital stay. Other experts say overcharges make up approximately 5% of hospital bills.
It's articles like this that make the public think that the doctors are getting rich off of this. We doctors know that this benefits the hospitals financially. However, this is a rip off to the public, and while the hospital is collecting over $100 for a box of tissues, we can't even get the $500 for an appendectomy that we got out of bed a 2AM to do! Where will this all end?
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