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Sure they do. I’ve negotiated discounts on medical bills a few times.
by philwelch 6y ago
Sure they do. I’ve negotiated discounts on medical bills a few times.
- dazhbog 6y agoFrom 1000% markup to 500% markup?
- philwelch 6y agoI’ve gotten the exact same price the insurance company pays pretty consistently, and sometimes even less.
- ensignavenger 6y agoI've attempted to negotiate medical bills and gotten no where in the past, so that's another anecdote.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoIt’s not the same to discount a bill (that you legally owe) compared to an insurance company having pre negotiated prices. If a healthcare provider decides to lower the amount they claim you owe because they believe it will cost them more to pursue you more than they will receive, that’s different than agreeing to a price before the services or products are exchanged.
- philwelch 6y agoSure, and that’s exactly what I’ve done, too. I have agreed to discounted prices, with surgeons, before the surgery was performed. I am not an insurance company. It only requires asking.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoI haven’t had success with that. It’s hard enough to just get procedure codes out of them so that I can ask the insurance company how much something will cost.
- camhart 6y agoMy experience has been the CPT codes change a lot once the procedure is complete. I even had an estimate for a surgery at $1800, but the final bill (including everything like anesthesia), heavily discounted because I'm in a healthshare (not considered insurance), came out to ~$10k (instead of ~$18k without the discount). Nothing went wrong/crazy in the surgery--and it was a fairly standard one. Once I paid the 10k, several months later I got ~$600 back saying I'd over paid, but they didn't include an explanation. Hospital pricing is a strange beast.
- philwelch 6y agoYikes. Stories like this make me increasingly think about options like Surgery Center of Oklahoma if I ever need a procedure done and I have crappy or nonexistent insurance. (https://surgerycenterok.com/ https://surgerycenterok.com/)
- philwelch 6y agoI never asked for procedure codes and it’s possible that since Obamacare, health care has gotten so bureaucratic and regulated that it’s no longer possible to do what I did. I never dealt with “procedure codes” and we didn’t have insurance. I just called the doctors office after finding out surgery was needed but before it was scheduled to get a cash estimate for the procedure and negotiate the price, and we made a deal, and then during one of the pre-op consults the doctor herself gave us a new written estimate with even more of a discount. For a different procedure, a different surgeon just gave us an estimate based on the insurance rate and when I asked if he could do more, he just said, “well if you do XYZ for the rest of your life you could just not have the surgery” and walked away like a rock star. Which is fine, hilarious in retrospect, but the insurance rate was enough of a discount and his point was valid.