Posted on 11/17/2013 5:57:44 AM PST by M. Dodge Thomas
Before undergoing an MRI, a CT scan or a surgery to clean up that wobbly knee, consumers had better become accustomed to hearing: "How do you intend to pay for that?"...
The shift comes as more consumers enroll in so-called high-deductible health plans, which require consumers to pay more out of pocket in exchange for lower monthly premiums. As a result, health care providers must collect a larger portion of patient bills from consumers themselves, rather than their insurance companies.
It's a delicate balance for hospitals, which have certain legal and ethical obligations to care for people who arrive with critical health conditions regardless of their ability to pay. At the same time, hospitals believe they must become more insistent and methodical about screening patients' ability to pay, particularly people with scheduled procedures or elective surgeries.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
My experience has been the opposite. I get the contract price, but have to pay it myself. The typical price for the MRI is $2500 list, $900 negotiated. I pay the $900.
I believe you’d have to check with your insurance policy regarding that question and how it applies towards your high-end deductible, as there maybe a hidden contractual conflict in there. Plus I do believe under 0bamacare most hospitals will be asking for your insurance and if you claim none I am sure some helpful social worker will come visit you to sign you up. LOL...
I’m okay with them ‘helping’ me sign up. I just won’t be able to give them any information that is worth a damn.
A healthy blast of genuine free-market medical services competition would solve the problem - fast.
$2500 for the equivalent of running a document scanner on a book for a few minutes? Ridiculous.
Why hasn’t an industry of MRI scanning facilities cropped up to allow capitalism to lower costs to saner levels?
Oh, that’s because of regulatory capture, where it’s near improbable cost- and certification-wise to start such a facility unless you’re Big Business with all the necessary political ties.
It’s crap like this that swings a functional country from being Free Market-based to fully Socialist, with democratic support aiding the change.
My doctor just opened his own MRI and CT Scan lab right next door to his office instead. Not sure how it's paying for itself although he does take in alot of referrals from other doctors for MRI's and CT Scans and his machines are always busy.
After my brother passed away from a massive brain aneurysm in August of 2011, my doctor made me get a very specific type of MRI on my brain & brain stem to look for aneurysm's as it turned out the type my brother passed away from was genetic.
Total cost to me was $450. Cash. If I had run it through my high deductible insurance the cost would've been over $2k with me fronting $750 out of pocket.
I think we're going to see alot more "concierge" type medicine with doctors refusing insurance and taking cash instead. Think about it: If they eliminate all the back office workers required to deal with the insurance claims and switch to cash instead, the costs for things like MRI's, CT Scans and regular office visits are going to become alot cheaper. Sounds like a win-win for the Doctors and the Patients IMO...
I love the idea of paying upfront for routine medical treatments. When I was in The Bahama’s, I broke my shoulder. I went to the hospital and had to pay 45 dollars for registration (cost for everyone regardless of care) and then 97.10 for X-rays. I paid 80 bucks for sling and medicine. That is it. That is how the American system works. Insurance should only be for major medical problems. If people had to pay out of pocket for most routine medical issues, people would not be going to the doctor for a splinter in the finger and a runny nose.
Not sure where you live, here in N.E. Illinois where I'm at there are at least 5 such facilities within 10 minutes drive of my home. (One of which is at my own Doctor's office.)
My understanding is that the contracts between medical providers and insurers prohibit the providers from negotiating their list prices. If the uninsured were to negotiate lower payments then the providers would eventually have to raise the amount they charge the insurance companies, who are currently being subsidized by the uninsured, by the negotiating power of their size.
So would those facilities be charging about $350 per MRI (which still seems high for a non-invasive scanning procedure) instead of the $2500 that hospitals charge for the same?
The people I know got burned in one of two ways:
1) They did not realize that there was a low yearly cap on the total insurance payout (”mini-med”) plans.
2) They had plan like the one you described, got really sick (cancer, etc.), and were dropped next plan cycle - and left with no insurance from their old carrier, and no chance of getting new insurance except through a state “high-risk” pool, which was closed to new applicants or had a long waiting line.
These are the people who spend down their assets to bankruptcy and then go on Medicaid - essentially, the rest of us are their “backup” insurers.
A lot of people do not like the ACA because it essentially bans the first type of policy, and prevents the sort of cancellations in the second case.
IMO, it’s not as easy a call as it first appears: we naturally want people to have freedom of individual choice about want type of insurance to purchase, but a lot of people end up making a choice that *guarantees* their costs will be shifted to *rest of us* if things go wrong.
Plus, you have the issue that a lot of the people who *want* to be responsible *can’t* afford better insurance.
The end result is that unless you put your head in the sand and ignore that fact that *someone* ends up paying for such care, when you try to come up with a system where everyone pays at least *something* for care they will receive, you come up with mandatory insurance + minimum coverage requirements + subsidies - in other words, something rather like the ACA.
From this perspective, one of the major things wrong with the ACA is that by subsidizing existing insurance practices - which *depend* on making it hard to discover in advance what service is being provided and what it will cost - it perpetrates a system designed to make “comparison shopping” difficult or impossible and continues insurance practices which make it difficult to discover which high-deductible plans makes sense to a given consumer.
So I would argue that as regards such disclosure the ACA(which tries to make apples-to-apples comparisons between standardized plans possible) does not go *far enough*”, and mostly, as part of a cozy deal to protect the current Byzantine pricing and insurance arrangements between providers and insurers.
I can only tell you what the facility that my personal doctor opened charged me, which was $450. My best guess is given the number of them around where I live, they have to be competing on price.
I am not aware of item 2 in the free market….prior to Obamacare. A principle of insurance is that when you have a claim, the company insuring you on the date of that claim is on the hook for that claim forever….that’s the risk. This is the evil of Obamacare - it “unisured the insured”
Also, the mini plans are the wrong way to go. Cat only,wtih high deducts, but something that will pay ALL of the cat is the soundest way to insure. Such plans are very much cheaper than most plans. This is the way we used to do it. It worked back then.
Up bet cash up front cuts cost, at just about any business.
Anti trust is not free market
“He said, ‘Call the doctor, I think I’m gonna crash’
“’The doctor say he’s comin’ but you gotta pay him cash’…”
Before government intervention and insurance company ripoffs, doctors used to accept cash and the payment was affordable.
I knew a doctor that had practiced since 1936. He hated the fact that by 1960 things had already gotten out of control. Regulation kept him from accepting chickens for payment, which he had done many time before. The IRS got involved and screwed up accounting. He went on and on about all the various government agencies that got between him and his patients.
While the provider may charge $2000 initially, what generally happens is the $2000 gets negotiated down by the insurer to something like reasonable, close to the $350. The guy who gets screwed is the man with no insurance (and thus no system to negotiate down the “full list price” rates) who has some assets, who gets socked for full price.
Hmm.
Why can’t there be a more open, market-based pricing for these procedures?
certainly beats hearing "There is a 6 month waiting time for an MRI/CT Scan..."
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