There's A Strong Chance You Are Paying For Expensive Medical Billing Mistakes

Medical bills are the gift that keeps on giving. Having lost my husband in January, I can attest that not even death puts an end to the steady stream of bills for his care that I still get in the mail. Balance billing, services not covered, out-of-network doctors ― they all come back to haunt you in the form of bills ― including a good number from doctors you’ve never met or heard of, and who you don’t when or why even saw your loved one. The bills? I expected them. What I didn’t expect was to learn that medical bills notoriously contain errors ― big errors. While there are no comprehensive statistics on medical-billing mistakes, Stephen Parente, a professor of health finance at the University of Minnesota who has studied the subject extensively, told HuffPost that his unpublished research put it at 30 percent to 40 percent of all bills except pharmacy bills. Groups that review bills on patients’ behalf, including Medical Billing Advocates of America and CoPatient, put the error rate much higher ― closer to 80 percent to 90 percent.  And it has serious consequences: Medical billing errors mar the credit reports of roughly 7 million Americans, a spokeswoman for the Commonwealth Fund, a Washington-based nonprofit focused on health-care research, told HuffPost. The credit rating agency Equifax found in an audit that hospital bills totaling more than $10,000 contained an average error of $1,300. Why are there so many errors being made?&nb...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news