March 7, 2006
Hospital Attitudes Towards Healthcare Delivery
Marion Davis has an interesting article in this week's Providence Business News that discusses the maze of factors involved in healthcare pricing. One section of the article discusses how hospitals seem not to like the health-savings account/high deductible insurance combination because they don't want to deal with some basic record-keeping that would be involved...
Hospital officials tend to loathe high-deductible plans, because it forces their institutions to collect large amounts of money from their patients -- a task they neither like, nor are particularly successful with.I have a hard time seeing how this is a real issue and not mostly inertia on the part of hospitals. Why should keeping track of usage information and collecting under-deductible payments be any more difficult for health insurance than it is for something like auto insurance?There are complications, too: Constance A. Howes, president and CEO of Women & Infants Hospital, said it's common for the hospital not to be able to figure out how much a patient actually needs to pay, because there's no up-to-date information on how much of the deductible has already been met.
Yup. Sounds about right.
the answer for health insurance is that you never know how much they will pay. For example, you have ten bills. Two are "paid" but only 50 percent of the full bill. So although you thought that meant your deductible was paid already, you find only half of the bill went to your deductible, the other half to you...
It's a scam.