Financial self-defense school, now in session: Make your own luck.

An Arm and a Leg

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

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 August 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

If you need medical care, it's like you've entered a casino, playing for your financial life, with the deck stacked against you. Lucky for us, we get insight — and tips the dealer WON'T tell you— from ace reporter Celia Llopis-Jepsen.

To start with, she got an executive from a health-care company to talk honestly — maybe more honestly than he realized — about how his company and others are playing the game, when they send patients bills for huge amounts.

Here's what else she found, when she investigated an $80,000 bill one man got: For many COVID patients, including the guy in her story, lots of providers just aren't allowed to bill for more than insurance pays them.

Those are providers who took some of the $175 billion in bailout funds that Congress passed out in March. Don't expect your provider to just tell you. (That $80,000 bill did not include a footnote saying, "Once insurance pays us, you can forget all about this.") But if you get a bill for COVID treatment, you can make your own luck and look up the provider yourself. Because Celia found a government database where you can SEE if your provider took those funds.

We also like Celia's Expert tip sheet for pushing back against your medical bills.

... and her first big medical-bill story— A Kansan's $50k Medical Bill Shows That You Don't Always Owe What You're Charged— is packed with insight too.

Note: When this episode was first posted, our host mis-pronounced the first name of a man who received an $80,000 bill. He is Anil Garmalkar. The audio has been corrected.

We are bringing you these self-defense lessons every two weeks from here on out. That's thanks to direct support from listeners. We'd love for you to support us too: https://armandalegshow.com/support/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Dan, super quick. If you appreciate what we're doing here on an arm in a leg,
0:04.4	I want to ask you to help us out. The biggest source of funding for this show is you.
0:09.1	And right now, any donation you make is going to be matched dollar per dollar thanks to news match from the Institute for Nonprofit news like you give us 50 bucks. They make it a hundred just like that.
0:20.9	You can do that right now at arm and a leg show dot com slash support thanks okay
0:26.2	here's a show Michael floor is the luckiest guy you're ever gonna meet he is a guy who
0:31.9	checked into a hospital with COVID-19 spent five weeks in a
0:35.9	coma and recovered. Those first five weeks, he doesn't remember. Just somebody shoving
0:41.1	a Q-tip up his nose for a COVID test, then he wakes up.
0:44.0	My doctor introduced yourself and basically said, you know, I saved your life,
0:49.0	and I told my ICU staff not to fuck it up.
0:52.0	The doctor said every major organ in his body had
0:55.3	failed that Michael basically had no right to be alive. I didn't believe her.
0:59.5	I didn't feel like my life was ever in danger. I mean he felt weak but he wondered for a minute if he was being pranked.
1:06.6	He says hearing the raw emotion in his wife's voice really brought him around.
1:11.0	At one point they had phoned her to say goodbye to him. No visitors
1:14.9	allowed in the COVID ICU. The next few weeks before he left the hospital were no picnic.
1:20.8	His kidneys had failed and he was on dialysis which sounded like a very unpleasant life sentence.
1:27.1	He wanted to travel, do all kinds of things. He thought for a minute about ending his life.
1:34.9	He says the nurses helped him gain perspective. Respecting everything that my wife and my kids, what they had gone through.
1:41.2	Not to mention the many thousands of people who had already died from COVID.
1:44.7	The end that all was good.
1:46.1	Yeah.
	...

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