So my daughter opens her mail to discover a bill from the local health care behemoth for $9,480.66, due upon receipt. This is a bit of surprise since it is years since she has had any business with these angels of mercy.
Back in the halcyon days of conglomerates, Gulf+Western, which began as the Michigan Bumper Company, became known as Engulf and Devour for snapping up all sorts of unrelated companied – New Jersey Zinc, a Puerto Rican sugar company, a cigar company, Simon and Schuster publishers, Paramount Pictures, Stax Records, Simmons Bedding and a swim suit company that owned the Miss Universe pageant. It was ridiculous.
Well, today local healthcare providers are engulfing and devouring in order to create regional monopolies. They gobble up competing hospitals, doctors’ practices, imaging services, and on and on. Ours is called Cone Health, but your town has surely got a similar all-inclusive provider. The slogan here is “The Network for Exceptional Care.” Judging from this recent experience, it ought to be changed to “The Network for Unusual Billing.”
The bill alleged my daughter owed the $9,480 as part of a “payment plan agreement,” which was also news to her. The service for which she was being dunned dated from June of 2011. That rang a bell since she had a surgery then that was 80 percent covered by insurance, but that has also required her to pay the surgeon $637 out of pocket, an anesthesiologist $648, and the surgical center $834.
Now, four years later, “The Network for Unusual Billing” wanted an additional $9,480. For what? Old time’s sake? The bill offered little help in this regard. In fact, it apologized because “due to a recent system upgrade, we have been unable to generate your monthly statement for your payment plan.” Not really a surprise since she didn’t have a payment plan.
A call to “The Network” produced the following amusing choice. “To make a payment, press 1. To receive an itemized bill, press 2. If you are a lawyer, press 3.” They must get sued a lot if they’ve included attorneys as a part of their phone menu. Since none of those applied, my daughter chose 4 – talk to a human.
As you might expect, when she explained she had received a weird bill that she didn’t owe, the customer service rep emitted a weary sigh. Apparently not the first such call. The woman asked if the bill ended with either the digit six or seven. It did. Whereupon she said, “We’ve been having some problems. Just ignore the bill, its wrong.”
We all know what happened, of course. Health care providers are being pressured to computerize their record keeping in order to standardize data, create greater efficiencies, promote best practices, and reduce waste, fraud and abuse. Any tinkering with technology inevitably produces chaos. Ask any business that has endured a ruinous quarter or two after installing SAP.
Bad enough if this kind of computer error happens at a widget factory or accounting firm, but not likely to cause your death. But if your hospital conglomerate’s information technology goes as crazy as HAL, the wrong bill is the least of your worries. What about the wrong X-rays or tests leading to the wrong diagnosis, the wrong medicine, the wrong surgery? Being sick is bad enough. Being simultaneously attacked by Robo-hospital is terrifying.