Kaiser Health News
Out for Blood? For Routine Lab Work, the Hospital Billed Her $2,400
Rachana Pradhan
Tue, 21 Nov 2023 10:00:00 +0000
Reesha Ahmed was on cloud nine.
It was January and Ahmed was at an OB-GYN’s office near her home in Venus, Texas, for her first prenatal checkup. After an ultrasound, getting anti-nausea medication, and discussing her pregnancy care plan, she said, a nurse made a convenient suggestion: Head to the lab just down the hall for a standard panel of tests.
The lab was inside Texas Health Hospital Mansfield, which opened in December 2020 in a Dallas-Fort Worth suburb. Ahmed, just eight weeks pregnant, said the doctor told her everything about the visit was routine. “Nothing really stood out,” Ahmed said. “And, of course, there’s just a lot of excitement, and so I really didn’t think twice about anything.”
Her blood tests checked for multiple sexually transmitted infections, her blood type, and various hormones. Within days, Ahmed began bleeding and her excitement turned to fear. A repeat ultrasound in early February showed no fetus.
“My heart kind of fell apart at that moment because I knew exactly what that meant,” she said. She would have a miscarriage.
Then the bills came.
The Patient: Reesha Ahmed, 32, has an Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield policy through her employer.
Medical Services: An analysis of Pap smear results and several blood tests in tandem with Ahmed’s initial prenatal visit, including complete blood count, blood type, and testing for STIs such as hepatitis B, syphilis, and HIV.
Service Provider: Ahmed got her tests at Texas Health Mansfield, a tax-exempt hospital jointly operated by Texas Health Resources, a faith-based nonprofit health system, and AdventHealth, another religious nonprofit.
Total Bill: The hospital charged $9,520.02 for the blood tests and pathology services. The insurer negotiated that down to $6,700.50 and then paid $4,310.38, leaving Ahmed with a lab bill of $2,390.12.
What Gives: Ahmed’s situation reveals how hospital-based labs often charge high prices for tests. Even when providers are in network, a patient can be on the hook for thousands of dollars for common blood tests that are far cheaper in other settings. Research shows hospitals typically charge much more than physicians’ offices or independent commercial labs for the same tests.
The situation was particularly difficult for Ahmed because she had lost the pregnancy.
“To come to terms with it mentally, emotionally, physically — dealing with the ramifications of the miscarriage — and then having to muster up the fighting strength to then start calling your insurance, and the billing department, the provider’s office, trying to fight back a bill that you don’t feel like you were correctly sent? It’s just, it’s a lot,” she said.
In Texas, the same lab tests were at least six times as expensive in a hospital as in a doctor’s office, according to research from the Health Care Cost Institute, a nonprofit that examines health spending.
The markup can be even higher depending on the test. HCCI data, based on 2019 prices, shows the median price for a complete blood count in Texas was $6.34 at an independent lab and $58.22 at a hospital. Texas Health charged Ahmed $206.69 for that test alone.
“It is convenient to get your lab done right in the same building,” said Jessica Chang, a senior researcher at HCCI, but “many patients are not thinking about how highly marked up these lab tests are.” Chang said she suspects many hospitals tack on their overhead costs when they bill insurance.
Anthem also charged Ahmed for at least four tests that most insurance plans would consider preventive care and therefore covered at no cost to patients under the Affordable Care Act’s requirements for covering preventive care, which includes aspects of prenatal care. Her EOBs, or “explanation of benefits” notices, show she paid out-of-pocket for a test identifying her Rh factor — which detects a protein on the surface of red blood cells — as well as for tests for hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and syphilis.
Asked to review Ahmed’s tests, Anthem spokesperson Emily Snooks wrote in an email to KFF Health News that the claims “were submitted as diagnostic — not preventive — and were paid according to the benefits in the member’s health plan.”
There “definitely shouldn’t be” out-of-pocket costs for those screenings, said Sabrina Corlette, co-director of Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends screening pregnant patients for several infectious diseases that pose major risks during pregnancy. Ina Park, a professor of family community medicine at the University of California-San Francisco and an expert on STIs, said the tests Ahmed received didn’t raise red flags from a clinical perspective. “It’s really more what the actual lab charged based on what the tests actually cost,” Park said. “This is a really exorbitant price.”
For example, Ahmed paid $71.86 in coinsurance for a hepatitis B test for which the hospital charged $418.55. The hospital charged $295.52 to screen for syphilis; her out-of-pocket cost was $50.74.
“You just wonder, is the insurance company really negotiating with this provider as aggressively as they should to keep the reimbursement to a reasonable amount?” Corlette said.
The Resolution: Ahmed refused to pay the bills and Texas Health sent the debt to collections. When she tried to get answers about the costs, she said she was bounced between the doctor’s office and the hospital billing department. Ahmed submitted a complaint to the Texas attorney general’s office, which passed it to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission. She never heard back.
According to Ahmed, a hospital representative suggested her bloodwork might have been coded incorrectly and agreed the charges “were really unusually high,” Ahmed said, but she was told there was nothing the hospital could do to change it. The hospital did not comment on the reason behind the high charge. And in a March 7 email, an AdventHealth employee told Ahmed the doctor’s office had “no control” over the hospital’s billing.
Ahmed filed an appeal with Anthem, but it was denied. The insurance company stated the claims were processed correctly under her benefits, which cover 80% of what the insurer agrees to pay for in-network lab services after she meets her deductible. Ahmed has a $1,400 deductible and a $4,600 out-of-pocket maximum for in-network providers.
“We depend on health care providers to submit accurate billing information regarding what medical care was needed and delivered,” Snooks said. Asked about reimbursements to the Texas Health lab, she added, “The claim was reimbursed based on the laboratory’s contract with the health plan.”
After a KFF Health News reporter contacted Texas Health on Oct. 9, the hospital called Ahmed on Oct. 10 and said it would zero out her bills and remove the charges from collections. Ahmed was relieved, “like a giant burden’s just been lifted off my shoulders.”
“It’s just been fighting this for 10 months now, and it’s finally gone,” she said.
Texas Health Resources and AdventHealth declined to respond to detailed questions about Ahmed’s charges and the tests she was directed to obtain.
“We are sorry Ms. Ahmed did not get clarity on her care with us. Our top priority is to provide our patients with safe, effective and medically appropriate care,” Laura Shea, a spokesperson for the hospital, said in an emailed statement.
The Takeaway: Ahmed’s problem demonstrates the pitfalls of using a hospital lab for routine testing.
For standard bloodwork “it’s really hard to argue that there’s a quality difference” between independent labs and hospitals that would warrant higher prices, Chang said. That holds true for other services, too, like imaging. “There’s nothing special about the machines that hospitals use for a CT or MRI scan. It’s the same machine.”
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Broadly, state and federal lawmakers are paying attention to this issue. Congress is considering legislation that would equalize payments for certain services regardless of whether they are provided in a hospital outpatient department or a doctor’s office, although not lab services. Hospitals have tried to fend off such a policy, known as “site-neutral payments.”
For example, the Lower Costs, More Transparency Act would require the same prices under Medicare for physician-administered drugs regardless of whether they’re given in a doctor’s office or an off-campus hospital outpatient department. That bill also would require labs to make public the prices they charge Medicare for tests. Another bill, the Bipartisan Primary Care and Health Workforce Act, would ban hospitals from charging commercial health plans some facility fees — which they use to cover operating or administrative expenses.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Colorado, Connecticut, Ohio, New York, and Texas have limited providers’ ability to charge privately insured patients facility fees for certain services. Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, and New York require health facilities to disclose facility fees to patients before providing care; Florida instituted similar requirements for free-standing emergency departments.
Patients should keep copies of itemized bills and insurance statements. While not the only evidence, those documents can help patients avoid out-of-pocket costs for recommended preventive screenings.
For now, patients can proactively avoid such extreme bills: When your doctor says you need blood tests, ask that the requisition be sent to a commercial lab like Labcorp or Quest Diagnostics that is in your network and have the tests done there. If they can’t do it electronically, ask for a paper requisition.
“Don’t always just go to the lab that your doctor recommends to you,” Corlette said.
Stephanie O’Neill reported the audio story.
Bill of the Month is a crowdsourced investigation by KFF Health News and NPR that dissects and explains medical bills. Do you have an interesting medical bill you want to share with us? Tell us about it!
——————————
By: Rachana Pradhan
Title: Out for Blood? For Routine Lab Work, the Hospital Billed Her $2,400
Sourced From: kffhealthnews.org/news/article/routine-bloodwork-lab-work-tests-surprise-bill/
Published Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2023 10:00:00 +0000
Kaiser Health News
Years Later, Centene Settlements With States Still Unfinished
More than three years ago, health insurance giant Centene Corp. settled allegations that it overcharged Medicaid programs in Ohio and Mississippi related to prescription drug billing.
Now at least 20 states have settled with Centene over its pharmacy benefit manager operation that coordinated the medications for Medicaid patients. Arizona was among the most recent to join the ranks, settling for an undisclosed payout, Richie Taylor, a spokesperson for the state’s attorney general, told KFF Health News in December.
All told, Centene has agreed to pay more than $1 billion in settlements, according to Cohen Milstein, one of the law firms representing states in the agreements. Meanwhile, St. Louis-based Centene reported $163 billion in revenue in 2024, largely proceeds from government health programs for Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act. The health care company has admitted no wrongdoing in the settlements.
Two state holdouts appear to remain: Georgia has yet to settle with Centene, even though the administration of Gov. Brian Kemp hired law firm Liston & Deas in 2019 to investigate state pharmacy benefit operations.
Florida hired the same law firm in 2021 to pursue overbilling allegations involving Centene, but state officials declined to answer a reporter’s questions about whether Florida has dropped the case, reached an undisclosed settlement, or is still discussing the issue.
Neither state has publicly disclosed what’s standing in the way of potentially tens of millions of dollars in Centene payouts, or whether negotiations are taking place. Because the deals are largely occurring outside the court system, the process between the private law firms hired by states and Centene remains generally out of public view.
Centene spokespeople did not return multiple phone calls and emails asking for updates. In 2022, the company said it was working on settlements with Georgia and eight other states, having reached deals with 13 others. And in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing in October, Centene said it had reached settlements with “the vast majority of states impacted” over the operations of its former pharmacy benefits manager.
Georgia has “taken disproportionately long compared to other states,” said Greg Reybold, a vice president of the American Pharmacy Cooperative, which represents independent pharmacies.
Meanwhile, Centene’s Georgia Medicaid plan, the Peach State Health Plan, lost its bid last year to continue its longtime participation in a Georgia Medicaid program in which companies cover the care for Medicaid recipients for a set fee from the government rather than for each medical service provided. The company, which has been part of the contract since the managed-care program began in 2006, filed a protest over the contract awards, saying that the process was “mismanaged, rife with errors and reckless practices.”
Nationally, pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, have come under increased scrutiny over accusations of pocketing discounts on medications or inflating costs in the years since Centene started settling its Medicaid-related allegations. Members of Congress have proposed major policy constraints on PBMs. Centene has since overhauled its PBM operation.
Still, a possible settlement in Georgia could bring in significant money to the state. California had the largest publicly disclosed settlement at $215 million, split with the federal government, but a settlement with Georgia could be in the range of the $88 million that Centene agreed to pay in the Ohio dispute, Reybold said.
The state should aggressively pursue a settlement with Centene, said Roland Behm, co-founder of the Georgia Mental Health Policy Partnership, who is a critic of Centene and its Georgia Medicaid plan. Behm said state Attorney General Chris Carr should take “the same tenacious prosecutorial action” against Centene that Carr’s agency takes against individuals involved in fraud against Medicaid, the federal-state program that provides health insurance coverage for those with low incomes or disabilities.
Carr’s office said in 2022 that it stood ready to represent Georgia in settlement negotiations with Centene. Carr, a Republican who has announced he’s running for governor in 2026, received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Centene, its subsidiaries, and its executives, as did Kemp, a fellow Republican, KFF Health News reported in 2022. Contributions to the Kemp and Carr campaigns were part of more than $26.9 million that Centene, its subsidiaries, its top executives, and their spouses donated to state politicians in 33 states, to their political parties, and to nonprofit fundraising groups from 2015 through 2022.
Since 2022, the company and its political action committee have contributed, combined, at least $2 million more to the campaigns of Florida and Georgia candidates of both political parties, along with state party organizations and political committees, according to state campaign finance records.
When asked about a possible settlement, a spokesperson for Carr, Kara Murray, directed a reporter to the Georgia Department of Community Health, which administers Medicaid.
Fiona Roberts, a spokesperson for that agency, then told KFF Health News that the department “is actively pursuing options to ensure regulatory compliance with the state’s contract.” She declined to comment further.
Florida’s attorney general’s office directed a reporter to the state agency that oversees Medicaid, the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration. But that agency did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails requesting comment.
Rebecca Grapevine of Healthbeat contributed to this article.
The post Years Later, Centene Settlements With States Still Unfinished appeared first on kffhealthnews.org
Kaiser Health News
Home Improvements Can Help People Age Independently. But Medicare Seldom Picks Up the Bill.
Chikao Tsubaki had been having a terrible time.
In his mid-80s, he had a stroke. Then lymphoma. Then prostate cancer. He was fatigued, isolated, not all that steady on his feet.
Then Tsubaki took part in an innovative care initiative that, over four months, sent an occupational therapist, a nurse, and a handy worker to his home to help figure out what he needed to stay safe. In addition to grab bars and rails, the handy worker built a bookshelf so neither Tsubaki nor the books he cherished would topple over when he reached for them.
Reading “is kind of the back door for my cognitive health — my brain exercise,” said Tsubaki, a longtime community college teacher. Now 87, he lives independently and walks a mile and a half almost every day.
The program that helped Tsubaki remain independent, called Community Aging in Place: Advancing Better Living for Elders, or CAPABLE, has been around for 15 years and is offered in about 65 places across 26 states. It helps people 60 and up, and some younger people with disabilities or limitations, who want to remain at home but have trouble with activities like bathing, dressing, or moving around safely. Several published studies have found the program saves money and prevents falls, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says contribute to the deaths of 41,000 older Americans and cost Medicare about $50 billion each year.
Despite evidence and accolades, CAPABLE remains small, serving roughly 4,600 people to date. Insurance seldom covers it (although the typical cost of $3,500 to $4,000 per client is less than many health care interventions). Traditional Medicare and most Medicare Advantage private insurance plans don’t cover it. Only four states use funds from Medicaid,the federal-state program for low-income and disabled people. CAPABLE gets by on a patchwork of grants from places like state agencies for aging and philanthropies.
The payment obstacles are an object lesson in how insurers, including Medicare, are built around paying for doctors and hospitals treating people who are injured or sick — not around community services that keep people healthy. Medicare has billing codes for treating a broken hip, but not for avoiding one, let alone for something like having a handy person “tack down loose carpet near stairs.”
And while keeping someone alive longer may be a desirable outcome, it’s not necessarily counted as savings under federal budget rules. A 2017 Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services evaluation found that CAPABLE had high satisfaction rates and some savings. But its limited size made it hard to assess the long-term economic impact.
It’s unclear how the Trump administration will approach senior care.
The barriers to broader state or federal financing are frustrating, said Sarah Szanton, who helped create CAPABLE while working as a nurse practitioner doing home visits in west Baltimore. Some patients struggled to reach the door to open it for her. One tossed keys to her out of a second-story window, she recalled.
Seeking a solution, Szanton discovered a program called ABLE, which brought an occupational therapist and a handy worker to the home. Inspired by its success, Szanton developed CAPABLE, which added a nurse to check on medications, pain, and mental well-being, and do things like help participants communicate with doctors. It began in 2008. Szanton since 2021 has been the dean of Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, which coordinates research on CAPABLE. The model is participatory, with the client and care team “problem-solving and brainstorming together,” said Amanda Goodenow, an occupational therapist who worked in hospitals and traditional home health before joining CAPABLE in Denver, where she also works for the CAPABLE National Center, the nonprofit that runs the program.
CAPABLE doesn’t profess to fix all the gaps in U.S. long-term care, and it doesn’t work with all older people. Those with dementia, for example, don’t qualify. But studies show it does help participants live more safely at home with greater mobility. And one study that Szanton co-authored estimated Medicare savings of around $20,000 per person would continue for two years after a CAPABLE intervention.
“To us, it’s so obvious the impact that can be made just in a short amount of time and with a small budget,” said Amy Eschbach, a nurse who has worked with CAPABLE clients in the St. Louis area, where a Medicare Advantage plan covers CAPABLE. That St. Louis program caps spending on home modifications at $1,300 a person.
Both Hill staff and CMS experts who have looked at CAPABLE do see potential routes to broader coverage. One senior Democratic House aide, who asked not to be identified because they were not allowed to speak publicly, said Medicare would have to establish careful parameters. For instance, CMS would have to decide which beneficiaries would be eligible. Everyone in Medicare? Or only those with low incomes? Could Medicare somehow ensure that only necessary home modifications are made — and that unscrupulous contractors don’t try to extract the equivalent of a “copay” or “deductible” from clients?
Szanton said there are safeguards and more could be built in. For instance, it’s the therapists like Goodenow, not the handy workers, who put in the work orders to stay on budget.
For Tsubaki, whose books are not only shelved but organized by topic, the benefits have endured.
“I became more independent. I’m able to handle most of my activities. I go shopping, to the library, and so forth,” he said. His pace is slow, he acknowledged. But he gets there.
Kenen is the journalist-in-residence and a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health. She is not affiliated with the CAPABLE program.
The post Home Improvements Can Help People Age Independently. But Medicare Seldom Picks Up the Bill. appeared first on kffhealthnews.org
Kaiser Health News
A Runner Was Hit by a Car, Then by a Surprise Ambulance Bill
Jagdish Whitten was on a run in July 2023 when a car hit him as he crossed a busy San Francisco street. Whitten, then 25, described doing “a little flip” over the vehicle and landing in the street before getting himself to the curb.
Concerned onlookers called an ambulance. But Whitten instead had friends pick him up and take him to a nearby hospital, the Helen Diller Medical Center, operated by the University of California-San Francisco.
“I knew that ambulances were expensive, and I didn’t think I was going to die,” he said.
Whitten said doctors treated him for a mild concussion, a broken toe, and bruises.As he sat in a hospital bed, attached to an IV and wearing a neck brace, Whitten said, doctors told him that because he had suffered a traumatic injury, they had to send him by ambulance to the city’s only trauma center, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.
After a short ambulance ride, Whitten said, emergency room doctors checked him out, told him he had already received appropriate treatment, and released him.
Then the bill came.
The Medical Procedure
Traumatic injuries are those that threaten life or limb, and some facilities specialize in providing care for them. For someone hit by a car, that can include stabilizing vital signs, screening for internal injuries, and treating broken bones and concussions. Zuckerberg Hospital is a Level 1 trauma center, meaning it can provide any care needed for severely injured patients.
In emergency medicine, it is standard to transfer patients to centers best equipped to provide care. Ambulances are typically used for transfers because they are able to handle trauma patients, with tools to aid in resuscitation, immobilization, and life support.
At the first hospital, Whitten said, doctors performed a thorough workup, including a CT scan and X-rays, and advised him to follow up with his primary care physician and an orthopedic doctor. He was evaluated at the second hospital and released without additional treatment, he said.
The Final Bill
$12,872.99 for a 6-mile ambulance ride between hospitals: a $11,670.11 base rate, $737.16 for mileage, $314.45 for EKG monitoring, and $151.27 for “infection control.”
The Billing Problem: Surprise Bills Are Common With Ground Ambulances
Ground ambulance services are operated by a hodgepodge of private and public entities — with no uniform structure, or regulatory oversight, for billing — and most function outside insurance networks. Patients don’t typically have a choice of ambulance provider.
There are state and federal laws shielding patients from out-of-network ambulance bills, but none of those protections applied in Whitten’s case.
Whitten was insured under his father’s employer-sponsored health plan from Anthem Blue Cross. So when he received a nearly $13,000 bill months after his short transfer ride, he sent a photo of it to his dad.
Brian Whitten said the bills from the two hospitals — and the family’s out-of-pocket responsibility — were in line with what he had anticipated. But he was stunned by his son’s ambulance bill from AMR, one of the nation’s largest ambulance providers. Anthem Blue Cross denied the claim, saying the ambulance was out-of-network and required pre-authorization.
“It didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, because the doctor is the one who put him in the ambulance,” Brian Whitten said. “It’s not like somehow he just decided, ‘Hey, can I take an ambulance ride?’”
Kristen Bole, a UCSF spokesperson, said in a statement that the health system’s standard of care is to stabilize patients and, when appropriate, transfer them to other medical facilities that are most appropriate to care for patients’ needs, adding that ambulance transfers between hospitals are standard practice.
While the medical system at large relies on negotiated prices for services, ambulance services operate largely outside of the competitive marketplace, said Patricia Kelmar, senior director of health care campaigns for PIRG, a nonpartisan consumer protection and good-government advocacy organization.
Ambulance transfers between hospitals to ensure the highest quality of care available are fairly common, Kelmar said. And with many hospitals being purchased and consolidated, it would follow that the number of ambulance transfers between facilities could increase as specialized medical units at any given hospital are downsized or eliminated, she said.
According to a study of private insurance claims data conducted in 2023, about 80% of ground ambulance rides resulted in out-of-network billing.
Generally, out-of-network providers may charge patients for the remainder of their bill after insurance pays. In some cases, patients can be on the hook even when they did not knowingly choose the out-of-network provider. These bills are known as “surprise” bills.
“It’s a financial burden, a significant financial burden,” said Kelmar, who is a member of the committee created to advise federal lawmakers on surprise bills and emergency ambulance transportation.
Eighteen states have implemented laws regulating surprise ambulance billing. A California law cracking down on surprise ambulance billing took effect on Jan. 1, 2024 — months after Jagdish Whitten’s ambulance ride.But Kelmar said those state laws don’t really help people with employer-sponsored insurance, because those plans are beyond state control — which is why federal legislation is so important, she said.
As of 2022, federal law protects patients from receiving some surprise bills, especially for emergency services. But while lawmakers included protections against air ambulance bills in the law, known as the No Surprises Act, they excluded ground ambulance transports.
The Resolution
Whitten’s father filed an insurance appeal on his son’s behalf, which Anthem granted. The insurer paid AMR $9,966.60.
Michael Bowman, a spokesperson for Anthem, said AMR had not submitted all the information it required to process the claim, leading to the initial denial. After consulting with AMR, Anthem paid its coverage amount, Bowman said.
But the insurer’s payment still left Whitten with a $2,906.39 bill for his out-of-network ambulance ride. Brian Whitten said he called an AMR customer service number several times to contest the remaining charges but was unable to bypass its automated system and speak with a human.
“I couldn’t find a way to talk to somebody about this bill other than how to pay it, and I didn’t want to pay it,” he said.
Unsuccessful and frustrated, Brian Whitten paid the remaining bill in January 2024, he said, concerned it would be turned over to a collection agency and hurt his son’s credit — and his well-being.
There was one more twist: He was shocked when he later reviewed his credit card statements and discovered that AMR had quietly but fully refunded his payment in October.
“It’s amazing that he got his money back,” Kelmar said. “That’s what’s shocking.”
In a statement, Suzie Robinson, vice president of revenue cycle management with AMR, said the company’s third-party billing agency regularly performs audits to ensure accuracy. An audit of Jagdish Whitten’s bill “revealed that the care provided did not meet the criteria for critical care,” Robinson said, which prompted the full refund.
Robinson said audits indicated fewer than 1% of its 4 million medical encounters annually are billed incorrectly.
The Takeaway
Robinson said patients who feel that AMR has billed them incorrectly should contact the company via email.
For patients in need of an ambulance in an emergency, there are few protections — and usually few options: Sometimes you don’t have a better choice than to get in.
Federal protections require that health plans cover certain surprise bills, with patients paying only what they would if they had received in-network care. Expanding those protections to ground ambulance bills would require Congress to act.
Ambulance providers deserve to be appropriately compensated for their vital role in our medical system, Kelmar said. But the system as it stands almost incentivizes providers to charge a higher rate, which can lead to surprise billing and financial hardship for patients and their families, she said.
Kelmar said she worries not just about the debt those bills create for consumers but also that people may decline vital ambulance transportation in an emergency, for fear of getting hit with an exorbitant bill.
“We just need to bring some sense back to the system,” she said.
Bill of the Month is a crowdsourced investigation by KFF Health News and The Washington Post’s Well+Being that dissects and explains medical bills. Since 2018, this series has helped many patients and readers get their medical bills reduced, and it has been cited in statehouses, at the U.S. Capitol, and at the White House. Do you have a confusing or outrageous medical bill you want to share? Tell us about it!
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
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