After a hospital stay, it is a good idea to review your bill line by line. There are often errors made and they can be corrected, especially if you approach it in a positive manner. We all have heard the horror stories of $75 aspirins being administered, and it is those stories that cause some distrust in hospitals.
Recently, as a young nurse was combed through the bills for her husband’s recent hospital stay, she found that there were charges for a drug that should have been $80, but was charged incorrectly at $875. There was also an administrative error which caused her husband to be hospitalized an extra day, and she knew from her hospital experience that they didn’t have to pay for additional unneeded care because of a medical mistake. She also discovered a charge for administering one medication 7 times a day, when the doctor’s prescription was only 4 times per day. In all, she uncovered $7000 worth of over charges on her bills.
So some good advice to all is to ask for an itemized bill and make sure that you check through it carefully. If you don’t know much about them, then pay cash and sit down with your doctor, not the billing department, to review each individual charge on your bill and what it means and take notes and ask questions. Finding out what you are being billed for, and don’t just accept it at face value.
If you are unable to find satisfactory answers to your questions, you do have other resources. There are patient advocate groups available to help. And don’t hesitate to contact the insurance commissioner in your state if you are having issues with your insurance company.
We have health insurance so that we know things will be taken care of when something happens to us or a loved one, but don’t fall prey to all the codes and numbers and just pay the bill as it is written. It is not uncommon for a medical bill to have errors, and you could be paying for things that you are not responsible for. So do your homework, and take the time to go over your hospital bill line by line, and you will more than likely find that the erroneous charges can easily be corrected.
It may seem difficult to find affordable individual health insurance, now a days, however there is a solutions. log onto www.individualhealthquotes.com and you can obtain health insurance quotes from multiple companies at one time.
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