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Friday, April 3, 2009

Hospitals Forced to Become Bill Collectors?

How about "patients control health-care dollars"?

The Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune ran an article with the above headline. The article addresses a new phenomenon: Twin Cities hospitals telephoning patients before scheduled procedures, and discussing how much they will owe out of pocket.

The reason: one in ten patients now have consumer-driven health plans, and the hospitals' bad debts are piling up. Call me crazy, but I think this is great news. Even one of the patients, who was scheduled for a C-section, got over her initial shock when others pointed out to her that this standard for any other facility providing a service.

Hopefully, patients will start engaging hospitals, figuring out how to save money by discussing the costs of their procedures beforehand. It shows a significant improvement over the situation I described a litte over two years ago, where a patient couldn't even discover how much he owed a primary-car doctor after he had paid him in full!

There's still a long way to go: Although a hospital featured in the article was able to discuss the price of its charges, it was unable to state how much the surgeon and anesthiologist charged. It's as if an airline could tell you how much they charged to rent you a seat during the flight, but not how much you owed the pilot and co-pilot!

This is largely due to a turf-protection privilege that physicians have lobbied for since time immemorial that prevents "the corporate practice of medicine". It is a medieval restriction, and I measure it in the Index of Health Ownership.

But with enough pressure from patients, this too shall pass.....

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