If your doctor or hospital is unhappy with the payment it receives from your insurance company and decides to bill you for the balance, do you have to pay? Often, the answer is no. But, in the morass that is health care billing, plenty of people don’t know that. So they wind up paying anyway, BusinessWeek reports.
The practice is known as “balance billing,” and it’s been around for years. Forty-seven states ban in-network providers from billing insured patients beyond co-payments or co-insurance required by the plan, BusinessWeek says. And federal law prohibits balance billing for Medicare patients.
But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. An insurer recently sued a New Jersey medical practice for billing more than 8,000 patients between 2004 and 2006 for a total of $4.3 million. A judge ordered the practice to stop balance billing, and give refunds to patients. Quest Diagnostics, the country’s largest lab chain, has been investigated for balance billing,
Source:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_36/b4098040915634.htm
The practice is known as “balance billing,” and it’s been around for years. Forty-seven states ban in-network providers from billing insured patients beyond co-payments or co-insurance required by the plan, BusinessWeek says. And federal law prohibits balance billing for Medicare patients.
But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. An insurer recently sued a New Jersey medical practice for billing more than 8,000 patients between 2004 and 2006 for a total of $4.3 million. A judge ordered the practice to stop balance billing, and give refunds to patients. Quest Diagnostics, the country’s largest lab chain, has been investigated for balance billing,
Source:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_36/b4098040915634.htm
