I wonder if this will lead to lawsuits due to pricing discrepancies between insured and uninsured pricing. There's no legitimate reason to charge the uninsured more, but hospitals do it routinely.
Not likely. There is a lot of nuance to the way fee schedules are actually (from a legal perspective) created and applied. Having created many such fee schedules and been resposible for operations at many facilities large and small they are done in compliance with applicable laws even though it may seem byzantine. There are always a handful of fraudulent operators though.
As of January 2021 it’s required for hospitals to publish a price list on their website or else pay a fine (which I think is fairly small though, like $300/day). The legislation just came into effect but it was passed in late 2019 IIRC.
When your regulatory fine is smaller than your greenskeeper bill.
Presumably this is because the default rate amongst uninsured patients is much higher than insured patients. You might have to fight the insurer to get your $1m, but you know for sure they have it.
Yep. Uninsured rates are set with the expectation that at best they'll get pennies on the dollar when they sell the debt to a collection agency.
And if I pay it? Charging wildly inflated prices which were not disclosed before treatment is straight up fraud.
Then you've subsidized all of the people who don't pay. If you ask they'll almost certainly give you a discount for immediate payment since it's still more than they'd get from the collection agency.
So you are saying by charging more money to a customer, it makes that customer more likely to be unable to pay. It's like a self fulfilling prophecy.