{"id":199,"date":"2024-12-20T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-20T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mobilenetinfo.com\/?p=199"},"modified":"2025-03-28T12:28:00","modified_gmt":"2025-03-28T12:28:00","slug":"bill-of-the-month-the-series-that-dissects-and-slashes-medical-bills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mobilenetinfo.com\/index.php\/2024\/12\/20\/bill-of-the-month-the-series-that-dissects-and-slashes-medical-bills\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Bill of the Month\u2019: The Series That Dissects and Slashes Medical Bills"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over 6\u00bd years ago, KFF Health News and NPR kicked off “Bill of the Month,” a crowdsourced investigation highlighting the impact of medical bills on patients.<\/p>\n

The goal was to understand how the U.S. health care system generates outsize bills and to empower patients with strategies to avoid them. We asked readers and listeners to submit their bills \u2014 and they kept coming. “Bill of the Month” has received nearly 10,000 submissions, each a picture of a health system’s dysfunction and the financial burden it places on the patients.<\/p>\n

Since 2018, we have analyzed bills totaling almost $6.3 million \u2014 including nearly $2.8 million that patients were expected to pay out-of-pocket.<\/p>\n

Cited at statehouses and the U.S. Capitol, the series has led to changes in health policy. Two patients featured by “Bill of the Month” were invited to the White House<\/a> in 2019 to discuss their surprise bills: Elizabeth Moreno’s $18,000 urine test<\/a> and Drew Calver’s $109,000 heart attack<\/a>. In 2020, Congress passed the federal No Surprises Act, shielding patients from most out-of-network bills in emergencies, among other protections.<\/p>\n

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Last year, the Biden administration announced plans to lower health costs<\/a> that included targeting a loophole that allowed health providers to evade the surprise-billing law \u2014 a problem first identified by “Bill of the Month.”<\/a><\/p>\n

Many patients submitted high prescription drug bills. In treatment for prostate cancer, Paul Hinds was billed nearly $74,000<\/a> for two shots of an old drug called Lupron, which can cost just a couple of hundred dollars overseas.<\/p>\n

Now, the federal government has identified Lupron as one of the medicines<\/a> that has seen its price rise faster than inflation \u2014 meaning its manufacturer owes rebates to Medicare under President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.<\/p>\n

The law also authorized the Biden administration to begin negotiating the price of specified drugs for Medicare patients, who now benefit from a cap on the price of insulin.<\/p>\n

“Bill of the Month” has helped many patients and readers get their medical bills reduced or forgiven. Roughly 1 in 3 bills were resolved for patients by the time their features were published.<\/p>\n

Bisi Bennett was charged $550,124 after her son was in a neonatal intensive care unit for nearly two months \u2014 despite having insurance. In a recent interview, nearly three years after her bill was investigated by “Bill of the Month,”<\/a> she said she initially thought resolving the bill would be simple.<\/p>\n

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“Nine months later, 10 months later, I was still fighting with them,” she said. “I really did feel like it kind of robbed me a little bit of the joy of the first months of motherhood.”<\/p>\n

Once a reporter started making calls, Bennett said, “they somehow miraculously figured out how to bill the right parties and get it sorted out.”<\/p>\n

But relief from individual bills is one thing; patients say bigger solutions are needed for what ails our health system. “This isn’t just about my bill,” Calver said in 2018, when his nearly $109,000 bill was reduced to $332<\/a> after being investigated by “Bill of the Month.” “I don’t feel any consumer should have to go through this.”<\/p>\n

The Takeaways<\/strong><\/p>\n

The “Bill of the Month” mantra is: If the bill is unexpected or seems off, don’t write the check. Each installment offered directions to navigate health care’s rough financial waters.<\/p>\n

Some bills memorably illustrated the absurdity of a system that turns ordinary mishaps into extraordinary revenues. After 3-year-old Lucy Branson got a Polly Pocket doll shoe stuck up her nose, her family was charged about $2,659<\/a> for an ER doctor to fish it out with forceps \u2014 essentially a long pair of tweezers.<\/p>\n

Here are some of the most important lessons \u2014 and some patients who offered their experiences to teach them:<\/p>\n