One of the items that Dave Chase calls for in his Fair Trade for Health Care Plan in his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call is bundled prices. He wants pricing to be transparent and up-front so that patients know what services they are receiving, and he wants prices to be bundled for any procedures that we undergo.
As chase writes, “Imagine buying a car and getting a bill for the transmission six months later. You’d be livid, yet this sort of thing happens all the time in the healthcare industry.” If you have ever gone to an emergency room or had a surgery, you likely have experienced what Chase is talking about. You were probably billed for the procedure and the doctor who saw you, but then you might receive a separate facility bill some time later, or you might receive a separate bill from the anesthesiologist months after you thought you had finished paying everything from the procedure or emergency room visit that you had.
The amount of additional bills that keep rolling in from a single procedure can be frustrating and overwhelming. You likely get an explanation of benefits that to an ordinary person doesn’t explain much of anything, and then you get multiple bills from multiple entities with no clear explanation of why you are receiving another bill. The confusion can easily frustrated patients and prevent them from being able to contest what many see as unreasonable charges.
In Chase’s Fair Trade for Health Care, providers would have to be up front about any costs that patients are going to incur before a procedure or encounter. This would include bundling all prices together ahead of time to reduce surprise billing. A patient can try to anticipate charges, but if they can’t anticipate who will be billing them, they cannot truly have a sense of what a procedure will cost them. This is an unfair practice from healthcare providers and drives up costs for everyone.
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