Despite Huge Profits, Catholic Hospitals Gouge Uninsured
This article is about as one-sided as it gets.
2 comments
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Despite Huge Profits, Catholic Hospitals Gouge Uninsured
This article is about as one-sided as it gets.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I’d personally like to see the USCCB use their clout to ensure that “Catholic” health care systems (including the outlying clinics and not just the hospitals) actually follow the moral and ethical guidelines. For example, they could stop doing tubal ligations, offering birth control prescriptions, and providing the morning after pill. They could actively seek out NFP only health care providers. They could avoid even the appearance of abortion (elective early induction of labor of infants with incompatabilities incompatable with life). Those kind of criticisms I could get behind.
Just to set the record straight, no matter what you set your cash patient fees at, Medicare and the rest of the insurance companies demand discounts off of that. To actually give a better deal to cash patients, you have to lower the discount differential in the contracts so the insurance pools pay more. This would allow the cash payment prices to come down without hospital bankruptcy and closure.
One practical point should be added. While their hands are tied regarding lowering prices for cash patients, hospitals are not required to send delinquent accounts to collection agencies. It is thus legal to simply write off a partially unpaid bill. The actual cash patient payments can thus be negotiated in advance verbally as part of a payment plan, the payments can stop after a certain number of payments and the hospital simply sends out dunning letters for the minimum prescribed period and just writes off the debt.
Hospitals do this regularly. Doctors do this regularly. It never hits the books and would not likely be captured by most studies.