Has billing from hospital stays gotten any better?

[Digit]

I vaguely remember one show done on the topic, but can't remember if it was 48 Hours, 60 Minutes or Dateline.
Medical bills kept arriving from various doctors from various things and nobody could figure out what was what. You could not tell if you were even being double billed.
Some woman was being billed for a circumcision or something else when she was the one in the hospital.

From my own experience when my mother was in the hospital, a neurologist who had been dismissed from the case stuck his head in the door the morning my mother was dying and billed medicare. As I recall, I did tell medicare about this, but don't know what happened since I was grieving.
Perhaps if we can get the medical community to correct their shoddy billing practices and itemize correctly, we could help some of these skyrocketing costs.
And it goes without saying that we need to counteract any fraud involving doctors billing medicare.

[mojavekid]

1. Sorry for your loss,

the Neurologist should be hung. We regularly receive duplicate bills for routine care - for our son. The bills are vague and we must be careful not to pay twice. Doctor office billing has historically been really poor in my experience.

On another note, my (republican) Brother is a builder of custom homes and one client following a payment of $500,000 - for just the tile for the job, told my brother that the money for this was "Stolen" from California Worker's Compensation Fund ( State Fund), via fraudulent claims, and unnecessary visits and procedures...He actually had the balls to tell him this, and seemed proud, saying everyone is doing it. what's worse, my brother only told me this by way of example, saying how this fraud in the system actually benefits business - i.e., him getting the job to build his house...very messed up.

[leesa]

2. Billing departments in hospitals are usually a mightmare. Amazingly

enough though they probably screw themselves over more than the customers. Insurance is just a friggin nightmare to navigate. Privatization is a disaster.

[Warpy]

3. It wasn't any better the last time I went to an ER, three years ago.

The billing department did everything in the book: unbundled labs to charge them separately, charged for phantom equipment and services, and upcoded what services I had gotten.

I sent letters to them for a year, then they sent the whole business to a collection agency. I called the collection agency and told them the bill contained massive fraud and was in dispute and advised them to send it back to the hospital, and I followed that call up with a letter.

I then made a formal complaint against them with the state Attorney General. Her interest was piqued, and I hoofed it over to Kinkos, copied all my documentation, and sent it off.

Needless to say, they caved as soon as the one nasty letter from the AG's office went out. It's really too bad, I was almost hoping they'd take this one to court.

The moral of this story is to read your bill very carefully. Keep copies and compare them. If you don't know what some of the gobbledygook is, make friends with a nurse or a biller in a doc's office and pick their brains. And then fight as hard as you have to in order to get a fair bill.

Hospitals are charging uninsured people three to five times what they charge insurance companies for the same services. They've cost shifted away from for profit corporations onto the backs of the sick who lack insurance. Finding fraud on top of the overbilling is finding a new and different definition for "chutzpah."