Are You Being Charged Incorrectly

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.

In one recent example, a young couple, he a doctor and she a nurse, had a bad billing experience. The husband had been hospitalized for a short time, and the wife began to review the bill line by line. She discovered charges for administering one drug 7 times per day, when it was only prescribed 4 times per day. The hospital had also made an error which caused her husband to have to stay an additional day. Because of her nursing background, she knew she didn’t have to pay for the extra day because of a medical mistake. She also found a charge for $875 for one drug that she knew should be around $80. Someone likely placed a decimal in the wrong place. Overall she found nearly $7000 of overcharges on the bill.

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.

There are also resources that you can use to help you find out more information about your bill, there are patient advocates available and if you are having problems dealing with your insurance company you can contact the insurance commissioner in the state you live in, and they can help you.

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 tough 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.