We have all heard frightening stories about how someone’s trip to the hospital led to a large medical bill, or to other insurance related problems. A group called Cost of Care did a contest where they asked people to share their stories. They recently announced the winners.
Cost of Care is a non-profit organization that believes that doctors should understand how the decisions they make impacts what patients end up being required to pay. They are backed by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and by the Harvard Pilgrim Health Plan.
They want doctors to have the information about the prices that patients face at the critical moment when a doctor makes a medical decision. The hope is that if doctors become aware of these costs, it will result in lower medical bills for patients.
Specifically, they want to point out there are many medical tests and treatments that are done that do not actually help patients to become healthier, or to get better. These tests inflate medical bills. Recently, the American College of Physicians recommended that doctors consider cost-effectiveness when they decide how to treat patients.
Last year, Cost of Care held a contest. They offered $4,000 in prizes for the best anecdotes illustrating the importance of cost-awareness in health care. They wanted people to send in their own, personal, stories about receiving a medical bill that was higher than they expected it to be.
They wanted to hear about people’s struggles to discover how much a medical test or treatment would cost. Cost of Care also was interested in hearing about situations where someone figured out a way to receive, or deliver, “high-value care”. This contest was open to patients and to health care workers.
That contest has ended. Cost of Care has announced the winners. There were two winners who were patients, and two more winners who were health care professionals.
One of the winners who was a patient was a woman named Renee Lux. She is from Connecticut. She was experiencing neck pain, and her doctor had her undergo a CT scan. There are plenty of other options that could have been selected in order to treat her pain. Now that she has had this unnecessary CT scan, she has officially been branded as having a pre-existing condition. This will make it much more difficult for her to find affordable health insurance in the future.
The other winner who was a patient was a man named Court Nederveld, who is from Florida. He has catastrophic insurance coverage, but does not have a “regular” health insurance policy. He managed to save money on heart tests and blood pressure medicines by shopping around, and also by pushing his doctors to explain their prices to him.
The health care professional winners include Molly Kantor, who is a medical student from Massachusetts. She helped treat heart failure on a $100 budget, and avoided an unnecessary hospital stay. The other winner was Andrew Schultzbank, a physician from Massachusetts. He explained how a pharmaceutical cost-shifting strategy left him unable to discharge his patient from the hospital.
Image by Sage Ross on Flickr