Here’s how to fight bad medical building. Spoiler alert: that bill may be illegal.
A 2020 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit organization that focuses on national health issues, found that nearly one in five emergency room visits and up to one in six in-network hospital stays prompted an unexpected out-of-network medical bill.
These bills arise because even if you visit an in-network provider, you can still be treated by an out-of-network physician who works there, said Karen Pollitz, the co-director of the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Program on Patient and Consumer Protections. “The doctors who work in hospitals generally don’t work for the hospitals,” she said. “They bill independently, and they can decide which networks they participate in.”
In January, a new federal law called the No Surprises Act went into effect, aiming to prevent health care providers from sending surprise bills to people with private insurance. (Protections like this were already in place for people with Medicare, Medicaid and Tricare.) But “the hospitals don’t always comply,” said Marshall Allen, the founder of Allen Health Academy, a health literacy organization, and the author of “Never Pay the First Bill.” So surprise bills are still a problem.
The good news is that with this new law in place, many unexpected medical bills can more easily be fought or lowered to a reasonable amount. Here’s how.
Read more at The New York Times.
