Melanie Evans
speaker
153 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard May 2024
Melanie Evans’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
WSJ Your Money Briefing · Hospitals Are Adding ‘Facility’ Fees for Routine Care · 28 Mar 2024
podcast
Hospitals are a very expensive place to get care, and they provide very specialized, very expensive services.
Where people are frustrated is they often don't know that fee is coming.
Had they known, they could have looked somewhere else for medical care.
And they're paying for services that don't really apply to the medical care that they've been receiving.
What hospitals say is these clinics are indeed an extension of the hospital.
And therefore, they are subject to hospital regulation, which comes with additional cost.
And hospitals cost a lot to run.
And so they apply the fees in order to pay for these very valuable hospital services.
The best recourse patients have is to ask before their appointment or when they're talking to their doctor and their doctor wants to refer them to another clinic or to a specialist, ask, is this clinic or physician affiliated with a hospital, and will I be charged a hospital facility fee?
Can you recommend anyone else who might be independent?
Those are maybe the best ways to avoid the fees.
Medicare also pays these fees.
So there is an advisory group to Medicare that has looked at whether or not Medicare itself is getting what it pays for.
And they have recommended that Medicare stop paying these hospital fees for dozens of services.
Legislation cleared the House last year that would place some new limits on these fees for a very specific set of services.
The advisory group to Medicare has recommended that Medicare not pay these fees.
What that would entail is changing the way Medicare prices these fees.
It would change the price to eliminate the additional amount.
So no, in that instance, it wouldn't leave Medicare enrollees on the hook for the difference.
Indeed.
Showing 121–140 of 153 · page 7 of 8
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