Jeanne Pinder
So your insurance company denied a treatment or a medication, in advance, and you want help. This is part of our series on billing advice (see below for other entries.) Here are a few steps. Understand the reason for the denial. Ask that it be clearly stated, in writing, and that the appeal process for […]
Jeanne Pinder
Humana, the big health insurer, came visiting the other day to ask ClearHealthCosts how much an X-ray costs. They spent 8 minutes and 46 seconds reading this blog post. You can see on the screenshot here of our analytics program. Interestingly, they came to us via the sketchy informationvine.com search. They came lots of other […]
Jeanne Pinder
“During a 2013 Morning Edition broadcast, Brian Lehrer and Soterios Johnson asked female listeners to complete a survey on the WNYC website on the cost of routine mammograms,” Bianca Fortis writes about us over at MediaShift, the destination site for insight and analysis at the intersection of media and technology. “The appeal was part of a collaboration with […]
Jeanne Pinder
Every time people try to tell us that no one is shopping for health care, we object. People are shopping for health care. It’s surprising that so many people cannot see this. A pair of recent studies concluded that little or no active or effective shopping around is getting done. Both are described on the blog of the […]
Jeanne Pinder
“A decade after the nation’s top hospitals used all their advertising and lobbying clout to keep their tax-exempt status, pointing to their vast givebacks to their communities, they have seen their revenue soar while cutting back on the very givebacks they were touting, according to a POLITICO analysis,” Dan Diamond writes over at Politico. “Hospitals’ […]
Jeanne Pinder
“The number of U.S. adults without health insurance has grown by some 2 million this year, according to a major new survey that finds recent coverage gains beginning to erode,” Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar writes for The Associated Press. “The new numbers highlight what’s at stake as Congress returns to an unresolved debate over Republican proposals to […]
Jeanne Pinder
“As Republican senators work to fix their troubled health care bill, there is one giant health insurance subsidy no one is talking about. It is bigger than any offered under the Affordable Care Act — subsidies some Republicans loathe as handouts — and costs the federal government $250 billion in lost tax revenue every year,” […]
Jeanne Pinder
“The Black Belt refers to a stretch of land in the U.S. South whose fertile soil drew white colonists and plantation owners centuries ago. After hundreds of thousands of people were forced there as slaves, the region became the center of rural, black America. Today, the name describes predominantly rural counties where a large share […]
Jeanne Pinder
“For five years, Christine Byrd figured her teenage daughter was going through a phase when she became withdrawn from friends and family and brushed off meals at home. It was only when Pepper Snider turned 17 that she was diagnosed with anorexia, triggering five years of intensive treatment, including thrice-weekly therapy, residential care, and hospital […]
Jeanne Pinder
We’ve learned some interesting things about providers publicizing cash or self-pay prices in our New Orleans partnership, “Cracking the Code.” Perhaps not surprisingly, when the people we’re talking with understand how this can benefit them, they give up the prices — information that for years has been a closely kept secret. We start out, as […]
