By Dan Weissmann, Kaiser Health News, August 10, 2020
When you need medical care, it can be a lot like entering a casino — playing for your financial life with the deck stacked against you.
But in this episode, reporter Celia Llopis-Jepsen offers insight and tips no dealer will divulge. She got a health care executive to talk honestly — maybe more honestly than he realized — about how his company and others are playing the game when they send patients huge bills.
When she investigated one man’s $80,000 bill, here’s what Llopis-Jepsen found:
Providers who took some of the $175 billion in pandemic-related bailout funds that Congress authorized in March had to promise not to ding patients with surprise bills for COVID-related care. But don’t expect your provider to merely tell you if that rule applies in your case. (That $80,000 bill did not include a footnote that said, “Once insurance pays us, you can forget all about this.”)
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