The concept of health insurance is simple: Pay a set cost every month in anticipation of a medical event. Break your arm? Don’t worry, with health insurance, when you go the hospital you only have to pay a portion of the total bill.
In practice though, health insurance is a complicated maze of in-network and out-of-network providers and premiums. That trip to the ER for a broken arm could result in thousands of dollars in medical bills, even with insurance, causing financial distress for more than half of all Americans. In simpler terms: Surprise medical billing.
The calls to take action against surprise medical bills have been growing. Vox has an entire series dedicated to collecting emergency room bills as part of a year-long project focused on Americans’ health care prices. Sarah Kliff, the journalist behind the project, tweeted that over 2,000 people have already submitted their bills to the Vox database.
And the findings are startling.
Kliff recently wrote a story on Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and the $20,243 bill they charged a patient for a broken arm. After a national outcry, the hospital reduced her charge to $200, the patient’s normal co-pay for an emergency room visit.
As part of their “Bill of the Month” series, Kaiser Health News and NPR profiled a man who fainted after getting a flu shot, was taken to the ER, and was released with a $4,692 bill. The largest portion of the bill? A $3,000 “facility fee” from the ER, just for walking through the door.
But it’s not just journalists taking on the massive health care system and unfair billing practices here in the United States – Congress and President Trump are taking notice, too.
In the 115th Congress, members of the bipartisan Senate health care price transparency working group released draft legislation to protect patients from surprise medical bills. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who also happens to be a gastroenterologist, said, “Patients should have the power, even in emergency situations when they are unable to negotiate…our proposal protects patients in those emergency situations where current law does not, so that they don’t receive a surprise bill that is basically uncapped by anything but a sense of shame.”
This bipartisan draft legislation is one of many proposed solutions. Senators Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH) introduced their own legislation, and so has Representative Lloyd Doggett (D-TX-35).
Just last week, the President held a health care roundtable focused on the issue. “[People] go in, they have a procedure and then all of a sudden they can’t afford it, they had no idea it was so bad. We’re going to stop all of it, and it’s very important to me,” he said.
It’s clear on all sides of the political spectrum that surprise medical bills must be stopped. Let’s hope that political posturing doesn’t get in the way of the real goal here: Helping the American people.