DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

We have seen the future, and it sucks.

The Medical Bill Mystery

3rd May 2015

Read it.

There are some thing s Man was not meant to know.

At first, I left messages on the lab’s billing office voice mail asking for an explanation. A few months ago, when someone finally called back, she said she could not tell me what the codes were for because that would violate patient privacy. After I pointed out that I was the patient in question, she said, politely: “I’m sorry, this is what I’m told, and I don’t want to lose my job.”

Bills variously use CPT, HCPCS or ICD-9 codes (more about those later). Some have abbreviations and scientific terms that you need a medical dictionary or a graduate degree to comprehend. Some have no information at all. Heather Pearce of Seattle told me how she’d recently received a $45,000 hospital bill with the explanation “miscellaneous.”

“Medical bills and explanation of benefits are undecipherable and incomprehensible even for experts to understand, and the law is very forgiving about that,” said Mark Hall, a professor of health law at Wake Forest University. “We’ve not seen a lot of pressure to standardize medical billing, but there’s certainly a need.”

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