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.
There is no data on how often people are hit with the charges. But it’s widespread enough that one of US of Care’s own staff members was charged while writing the report – a facility fee of $154.52 was added to a bill for a flu test.
“Ultimately, consumers are […]
We have become a society filled with fraud on so many levels. Why not charge for something that never happened? Since we do not jail the elites it becomes a matter of seeing what can be gotten away with. If caught, there will be a corporate fine and a slap on the hand with no context if the fine will be of an amount that is dissuasive, or if it’s just a cost of doing business as the fine is much less than the profit made. Until we work to eliminate fraud in commercial transactions we will continue to have these examples crop up. Might we call this type of charge another junk fee? Jail a few executives and they will reform themselves. The managerial class in the country has gotten away with vast amounts of misbehavior over many, many years.