Last year, a buddy of mine was in an accident. They spent some time at Hahnemann hospital.
Buddy: I finally resolved the issue with my bill.
Me: Yeah?
Buddy: Yeah. They fucked it up, like, 4 times, but now me, my insurance, and Hahnemann are all squared up.
Me: Good!
Buddy: You heard they’re closing it, right?
Me: Yeah, Bernie Sanders held a big protest and it did nothing
Buddy: Do you know why they’re closing?
Me: Not really.
Buddy: They say they’re losing millions of dollars. The impression I got was that they felt like they couldn’t make any money serving poor people*. They serve some of the most under-served people in the city.
Me: That already sounds like bullshit.
Buddy: So, here’s the thing. I’m really smart**. And I’m diligent. And I know when the hospital bills me wrong.
Buddy: Hahnemann fucked up my bill, and I got billed with the final cost instead of my insurance. If I hadn’t been smart and diligent, I would have been stuck with the full cost of that ER visit. But I took care of it- I called my insurance and I got it sorted out.
Buddy: I broke my back. My visit cost 65,000 dollars. If I had to pay that… I wouldn’t be able to pay that. That would just go unpaid, because I don’t have that money. They could sue me, they could threaten me, they could send bill collectors after me. I would never pay that bill, because I can’t.
Buddy: Let’s round that number down to an even 50,000 dollars. If Hahnemann University Hospital fucks up bills that size 20 times per year for patients who don’t understand insurance well enough to navigate all the bureaucracy, they’re out a million dollars. 200 people per year is 10 million dollars. Et cetera, et cetera.
Buddy: If your billing department doesn’t get the bills paid, you go out of business. End of story. Hahnemann could have been making plenty of money, but they decided to screw around.
Buddy: And now people are going to lose their doctors and ER care because Hahnemann couldn’t pull their heads out of their asses for 30 minutes and figure out that all they have to do is actually bill the insurance companies.
Me: We could also just get single-payer healthcare and avoid much of this
Buddy: That too.