Wall Street Journal Columnist Examines Difficulty Of Deciphering Hospital Bills After Childbirth

Main Category: Pregnancy / Obstetrics
Also Included In: Public Health;  Health Insurance / Medical Insurance
Article Date: 11 May 2009 - 2:00 PDT

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Anna Wilde Mathews in the Wall Street Journal's "Healthy Consumer" column on Thursday discussed the challenges of understanding health insurance coverage and out-of-pocket expenses for childbirth-related medical bills. According to Wilde Mathews, determining her expenses after giving birth left her "befuddled," and she wished that she had "read the fine print" of her health plan after an insurance company representative gave her a misleading estimate of her out-of-pocket costs.

Wilde Mathews also describes the process of verifying the accuracy of her hospital bill. She writes that "[i]t's important for patients to get good information about what they have to pay and why" but that it is "not easy." She continues that she "struggled" in her attempts to determine "whether the amounts I was told to pay were appropriate," finding that "often, information wasn't available, or was hard to decipher." She writes, "To be smart medical consumers, we need to be able to easily learn and compare prices for medical services. And we should have a way to effectively check our bills." According to Wilde Mathews, "Hospitals and insurers are aware of these problems, and a number of them are trying to make pricing information more transparent." For example, some hospital operators have out-of-pocket cost estimators on their Web sites, and some offer cost projections over the phone (Wilde Mathews, Wall Street Journal, 5/7).

Reprinted with kind permission from http://www.nationalpartnership.org. You can view the entire Daily Women's Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery here. The Daily Women's Health Policy Report is a free service of the National Partnership for Women & Families, published by The Advisory Board Company.

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