Hospitals adding charge to bills from doctors’ offices, outpatient surgical clinics and diagnostic centers they own
Hospitals are gobbling up doctor’s offices – and they’re bringing higher prices to patients when they do, even if a patient never sets foot on a hospital campus.
Enter the “hospital facility fee”: a charge hospitals can add to bills from doctors’ offices, outpatient surgical clinics and diagnostics centers that they own, rebranding them as “outpatient hospital departments”, even if the facility is miles from a hospital campus.
“It’s one of the most egregious examples of hospital financing at the expense of consumers,” said Liz Hagan, director of policy solutions at the United States of Care, a non-profit advocacy group that released a new report on the practice.
The report, “Behind the Bill” argues that “hospitals are at the center of a massive market failure”, where consolidation is driving price hikes for patients.
I am just a consumer of medicine, so this is second hand.
I live i a pretty big city that you have heard of.
We have two mega corporations that bought up the hospitals and then went for the doctors offices and specialties.
Let’s call them Corp A and Corp B.
Corp A was appreciably better in quality than Corp B but corporations are going to cut costs and race to the bottom.
The doctors in my city just quit and started their own companies. They are excellent.
Now Corp A has an excuse to focus on patient care and they are pretty dang good.
Corp B still sucks. I feel bad for the people who have to go there.