This post has been shared by the AdvoConnection Blog. It was written with a patient-client audience in mind, but might be useful to you, too.
It is provided so you can find it in a search here at myAPHA.org, but you’ll need to link to the original post to read it in its entirety. Find the link to that post at the end of the excerpt.
Here – Let Us Help You Pay Us Way Too Much!
Just when you think you’ve heard it all…. Now hospitals are “helping” their patients with finances, too. If you don’t give that much thought, then it seems like a great idea. “We recognize you owe us more money than you can afford, Mr. Johnson. So we’re going to help you figure out how to pay for it!” Yes, according to Stat, Financial counselors help patients navigate costly care, you, too, can sit with a hospital’s financial counselor to see how you can use your life savings, your credit cards, borrowed money – whatever it takes – to be sure the hospital gets ITs pound of your flesh (if they haven’t taken it all already.) The truth is – in its purest form, this is a smart move for hospitals, and can be beneficial to its patients, too. The problem is, not enough patients will question their bills to begin with, and therein lies the rub. Look at it another way: THE house you have always wanted to live in, that you have admired for decades, the one you’ve always thought was home-nirvana, comes on the market. The price of that house is $1 million dollars. So you go to the bank, you take out a mortgage, and you buy that dream house. Thank heavens the bank was there to lend you the money, right? Even if you have to pay it back for the next thirty years – now your dream house is yours! But what if the house, in the market where you live, was only worth $500,000? You never thought to evaluate the price – vs – the benefit. The seller never bothered to mention that the value of the house was actually half its price. The banker, who makes much more money on a million dollar mortgage than on a half-million one, didn’t mention it. And now you are stuck with paying twice as much for the house, twice as much for the mortgage, maybe for twice as long, as you would have if you had asked those questions, and made those reviews, to begin with. What you needed was an appraiser and a negotiator. Unfortunately, among those people who “helped” you buy your dream home, none of them would give you an honest assessment, nor would they have ever suggested a lower price, because they all stood to make more money by failing to mention your…