Hospital bills are confusing, frustrating and often unreasonably expensive.
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A year ago, a study about U.S. hospitals marking up prices by 1,000 percent generated headlines and outrage around the country.
Twenty of those priciest hospitals are in Florida, and researchers at the University of Miami wanted to find out whether the negative publicity put pressure on the community hospitals to lower their charges. Hospitals are allowed to change their prices at any time, but many are growing more sensitive about their reputations.
What the researchers found, however, was that naming and shaming did not work. The researchers looked at the 20 hospitals’ total charges in the quarter of a year before the publicity and compared them to charges in the same quarter following the publicity. There was no evidence that the negative publicity resulted in any reduction in charges. Instead, the authors found that overall charges were significantly higher after the publicity than in previous quarters.
Of course there was no change. No one heads to a hospital for fun. When you’re in an accident you don’t tell the ambulance driver, “oh not that hospital, they charge too much.”
I would be curious to see if hospitals give kick backs to EMTs who deliver patients to them.