“Baby steps” in the fight against facility fees

An Arm and a Leg

Society & Culture, Medicine, Health, Health & Fitness, Documentary

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 26 September 2024

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

An $88 “observation room” fee for a check-up didn’t sit right with Kari Greene, a listener from Oregon. When the price went up to $99 the next year, Kari complained to her benefits rep; they thought it was weird, too — but couldn’t do anything about it.

In states like Connecticut and Indiana, legislators are trying to do something about fees like these – often called “facility fees.”

In this episode, we go deep on Kari’s bill, one of dozens that listeners have shared with us over the past few months.

And we talk with Christine Monahan, a researcher and attorney who knows more about facility fees — and state efforts to limit them — than any other expert in the country.

Here’s a transcript of this episode.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there.
0:01.0	Karay Green lives in Portland.
0:03.0	She's got a couple of autoimmune disorders, mostly under control these days.
0:07.1	She sees her rheumatologist a couple times a year, just to check in.
0:11.6	And last year, she noticed a charge on top of the $40 co-pay she was used to.
0:17.0	This was another $88 for an observation room fee. She says she called her insurance and the person I spoke with was
0:25.0	like this seems weird. She says they promised to investigate but
0:28.8	Kari never heard back. Eventually she paid the bill, moved on with her life.
0:34.0	And then after Kari's appointment at the start of this year,
0:38.0	that fee was there again, but instead of $88? That was 99.
0:43.6	Kari was pissed. She still is.
0:47.0	And I'm like, how dare you? It's such a slap in the face where you're like,
0:52.0	I already paid my co-pay and now they want a
0:55.1	hundred bucks on top of that for no reason kari can see and kari is pretty sure this is
1:01.4	not just her that's the part that galls me. It's like there's this
1:06.1	Scrooge McDuck back there going, oh we've got this doctor who works her little tushy off and she sees five patients an hour and we can
1:19.3	add this charge on to every single one of these office visits.
1:23.2	Kari is definitely right, this is not just her.
1:26.1	I mean, we haven't found Scrooge McDuck in his swimming pool full of currency yet,
1:31.9	but researchers and advocates have been talking for years about these kinds of
1:36.8	extra charges. They're called facility fees and they can get tacked on to
1:41.2	office visits by hospitals when the hospital owns the doctor's
	...

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