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If you are a patient in this situation, there are advocates who can help you. One thing to try is to ask the billing department if they will "accept assignment
by tomohawk 8y ago
If you are a patient in this situation, there are advocates who can help you. One thing to try is to ask the billing department if they will "accept assignment". What that means is that instead of billing you their fake rate, they would instead bill you as if you were an insurer.
IMO, it is incredibly unethical and dishonest for these medical corporations to charge different fees depending on who you are. Prices should be transparent, and should be the same for everyone.
Some may argue that an organization representing a large pool of people should be able to achieve economy of scale and a better price. This seems false to me, as in reality there is only one pool of people and care provider provide care to that one pool. Its time to kick the middlemen out.
- cheez 8y agoWhen you remove the middlemen, what will you replace them with?
- lallysingh 8y agoTiny bits of software.
- cheez 8y agoWhat's the purpose of the software?
- RhodesianHunter 8y agoReplacing the middle men
- _asummers 8y agoMiddle man out algorithms
- cheez 8y agoIs the software written by people who would not profit from the software?
- 50656E6973 8y agoCould be an open standard
- cheez 8y agoThis is quickly degenerating into... an xkcd comic
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Nasrudith 8y agoMiddlemen are not indispensable - they need to justify their existence not others to justify their absence. The whole point of cutting out the middlemen is to force them to go from a parasitic role to offer some sort of actual utility for their price. If the middlemen have something of value to offer they have little to fear - just someone to buy gasoline by the tanker for instance keeps gas station middle-men safe because they provide both a workable connection between logistics of the very large production and consumer scale amounts - in addition to the distribution.
- mirimir 8y agoI've done that. Except I didn't know the words "accept assignment". I basically just said that I'd pay whatever they'd charge if I had insurance. So they could either accept that, or let it go to collection. And if they let it go to collection, I argued, they'd probably get less than the insurance price that I'd pay them. And I got an adjusted bill.
- thatoneuser 8y agoGod this a thousand times. How in the /fuck/ have we allowed our medical system to come to this? I get the negotiation side of things. I get that the leverage insurance companies have is the culprit. But at the end of the day, hospitals just upcharge so they have the upper hand in negotiation. There’s no reason that individuals who choose not to go the insurance route are artificially charge X times what insurance companies are. There’s no excuse. Charge them the cost of the procedures with whatever markup is reasonable for the hospital to stay in business. It shouldn’t be any other way.