How Successful Are Attorneys at Negotiating Medical Bills With Hospitals?
Our country has some of the highest health care costs in the world. Even if you report to the emergency room with an injury as straightforward as a broken arm after an accident, you could receive medical bills totaling tens of thousands of dollars. The truth is that average Americans can’t afford to pay their medical bills, given the exorbitant cost of care. This especially applies to victims of injuries that keep them from work, even for a short time.
A personal injury attorney can be a valuable ally in several ways – first, they help determine who is fault for your injuries and help hold the responsible parties accountable. Second, they help ease your financial burden by making sure that the negligent party pays for the full amount of your medical bills – and part of this is negotiating your medical bills with hospitals. Here’s how we do it.
Yes, You Can Negotiate Your Medical Bills
Most people who receive care at hospitals have experienced the sticker shock of getting the final bill. Consider the following average costs:
- Cost of treating a heart attack: $20,000
- Cost of treating blood poisoning (septicemia): $18,000
- Cost of a broken arm: $3,000
- Cost of a single day inpatient stay in California: $3,500
Even after insurance coverage, families end up owing thousands of dollars for simple and even routine medical procedures. What most people don’t realize, however, is that many of these costs are inflated because insurance companies typically cover only a fraction of what a hospital charges. As a result, hospitals inflate their prices, so insurance companies will pay more on a claim, and the cycle continues. Unfortunately, this just creates premium increases and the extra costs are passed on to the consumer.
The advantage of these inflated costs (if you can call it that) is that there is some room for negotiation in your medical bills.
What is a “Hospital Lien?”
Hospital liens generally arise when you receive emergency care at a hospital in an accident and one of the following applies:
- You don’t have insurance to pay for care
- Your insurance will only foot a small portion of the bill
- Your insurer will not pay for anything because a third party was responsible for injuries (and the insurer thinks the third party’s insurance should pay for your injuries)
Unfortunately, while your case is still pending, you might receive nagging calls from the hospital’s billing department, which eventually files a lien against you for payment. If a lien against you exists, your attorney will likely have to negotiate with the hospital to lower your medical bills while your personal injury case is still pending.
Step one in negotiating a hospital bill is determining which charges are grossly inflated. Your attorney will likely order an itemized list of charges from the hospital, which will identify some inflated charges – for example, it’s common for a patient to be charged $71 for a bottle of Tylenol or several hundred dollars for an IV of saline solution. These are unreasonable charges that can be eliminated or reduced drastically to reflect their actual value – pennies on the dollar.
There is a precedent in California that requires the hospital to determine the reasonableness of a charge. If your attorney thinks that a cost is unreasonable, then the burden of the proof is on the hospital to provide enough evidence that your medical bill costs are indeed reasonable.
Finally, your attorney will look for evidence of double billing or unethical balance billing. Balance billing occurs when a health care provider charges a patient for the difference between what insurance covers and the overall cost of the bill.
These practices often result in larger initial medical bills and serve as a point of negotiation for your attorney. With your lawyer’s help, you could negotiate your medical bills down significantly. To review your medical bills and personal injury or medical malpractice lawsuit with our attorney, contact the Liljegren Law Group today for a free consultation.