The Medical Bill Mystery
3rd May 2015
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.”
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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.”
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“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.”