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.
It’s not the doctors. It’s their corporate overlords. Doctors are getting fucked by the system too. I have a friend that decided to become a doctor after already attending three years of college. By the time he was a resident, he realized he’d never be able to pay off his student loans with an internist’s income, and had to go back to med school for a specialty.
He also said that his first medical group was so scummy that they held regular meetings about the doctor’s reviews. No, not their treatment records or patient comments, the fucking reviews on ratemydoc and Google. Someone complained that he didn’t prescribe antibiotics even though the patient “knew” they had an infection, and the advisors straight up told him to prescribe them if someone asks for them moving forward. It’s fucking gross.
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.
I’m reminded of the Stanford Prison Experiment. The doctors are just doing what they’re told!
Most don’t. They can’t get fired for dismissing medical advice from a non-medical advisor. My point is they are getting screwed by the corporations as well, and have no say or control over billing systems. Starting a private practice is a massive risk unless the doctor is independently wealthy, so most of them have no choice but to accept jobs in corporate medicine.
My point was we are almost all prisoners of the corporatocracy. If you’re lucky and born into extreme wealth then you can escape the need for employment.