Last week after having my telemedicine appt my doctor sent me in for some blood work. I just got the Medicare summary of charges and one of the line items was $20 for "Handling and/or conveyance of specimen for transfer from office to laboratory". They freakin' charged me a delivery fee for my specimen to be delivered to the lab! I guess they weren't making enough and decided to tag on another fee. I mean WTF, is the next thing going to be a tip for the driver? This is just ****ing amazing. I'm actually going to call Memorial Care and give them **** today. I can see it, someone at Memorial was looking at invoices from the lab and saw they were charging them $20 per pickup and they decided to bill the patient rather than absorbing it as a cost of doing business. It should only be 1 - $20 charge per location, not per sample... right?
**** them.
Mike
Medical billing
Cost is crazy, yes. You have to also account for the fact less than 50% of medical bills are actually paid, heh.
Disclaimer: Please use caution when opening messages, my grasp on reality may have shaken loose during transmission (going on rusty memory circuits), even though my tin foil hat is regularly audited for potential supply chain tampering. I also eat whatever crayons are put in front of me.
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I get that. Sometimes it just burns me up at what they try to get away with. That I know for a fact. About 2 years ago I went in to have some skin issues looked at. They were basically nothing and they were frozen off with liquid nitrogen. Well, when the bill came i took a look at what the billing code meant. It was for "up to 14 removals" and I had only had about 6 taken off. Mind you, there were plenty more on my body but I was only looking to have the more obvious ones removed. The next time I was in seeing this dermatologist I mentioned this discrepancy and thought that he still owed me for another 7 removals since I had basically paid for them. Both he and the nurse looked a little surprised and ask how I knew this. I told him i look at what I'm being billed for and do research on the code numbers assigned to each procedure. He agreed that I was right and proceeded to remove about 15 more for free.Philip wrote:Cost is crazy, yes. You have to also account for the fact less than 50% of medical bills are actually paid, heh.