The Wall Street Journal reported this week that hospitals are adding billions of dollars in facility fees to patient bills, even when patients don’t set foot in a hospital.
“Once an annoyance, the fees are now pervasive, and in some places they are becoming nearly impossible to avoid,” The Journal reports.
Your union’s health plan and participants are getting hit with these fees. Do you think your health insurance company scrubs those inflated charges out? They don’t.
Abuses in hospital and physician billing cost a typical union or employer health benefit plan millions of dollars yearly. Research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimates that medical pricing irregularities, fraud, and abuse cost $289 billion to $324 billion per year. Sixty two percent of personal bankruptcies filed each year are the result of medical debt.
When your participants are on the receiving end of something like this, contact WellRithms. We use advanced technology and expert physicians to review bills before your group plan and members pay them. We help protect union groups from these inflated charges so they can put their money back into their funds and protect their members’ compensation.
Enough is enough. When did integrity become an option instead of something to live by? Here is the article, which goes into detail on how hospitals continue to overbill patients and their health plans.
