The fallout from California’s balance billing ban is about to get much, much worse.
A patient is suing an emergency physician group for the $57 he spent last year on the balance bill he had to pay for services his insurance didn’t cover.
If successful, the results for already near-bankrupt hospitals are chilling, as “hospitals and ER doctors could be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars in collective refunds to patients.”
Emergency physician WhiteCoat asks you to consider the following: “When your dad is dripping with sweat, can’t breathe and is clutching his chest with a heart attack and seconds count, the next hospital emergency department that closes because of lack of funding just may be the one down the street from you. When your child stops breathing and you have to drive an hour or more in traffic and hope that you get to the hospital before your child dies, think of the California Supreme Court’s ruling about balance billing and ask yourself whether the lives of your family were worth $57.”
Indeed.
Related posts:
- The case for balance billing
- Note to politicians: Balance billing is essential
- Support balance billing; How doctors lose money; Finding rural doctors; Online medicine thriving
- The sad state of pediatrics in California
- My take: Medicare, balance billing, me, op-eds
- Hospital billing vs Google
- Unable to provide proper patient care, emergency doctors are suing the state of California
{ 2 comments }
Spell it out for me. At an extreme, would it be possible for an insurance company to write policies setting a ER fee schedule of, say, one dollar for the ER doc fee?
And then use the California law to force the ER doc to accept that dollar as payment in full for the service rendered in the ER?
Does anyone know any other arena where the customer is not entitled to know even a hint of what the charges will be until they see the bill a month after the fact? Or where the batting average tends to be so extremely low? If my auto mechanic tried to bill me this way or failed so miserably in coming to an accurate diagnosis he’d be liable for civil charges and would lose his license. Yet an ER contracting outfit can illegally balance bill my wife after stating TWICE in the newspaper that this is not their practice to balance bill- and now we are threatened to be taken to collections for what we do not owe? As it is, the doctor who spent ten minutes on my wife (and had no answers for her stroke-like symptoms) has been paid a few hundred dollars for those ten minutes- and this is NOT enough? What is wrong with this picture???
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