Jeanne Pinder
Headscratchers: Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois refer their insured people to us to save money on health care. In a piece titled “Be the 1 in 5 who’s saving money,” the piece posted on these two sites explains how to save — by using, among other tools, […]
Jeanne Pinder
A community member shared one price — anesthesia during treatment for an ectopic pregnancy. We asked for details, and she said: 1. This was the bill from the anesthesiologist during a salpingectomy I had. It was an emergency surgery that arose from an ER visit. I was discharged the same day. 2. I have healthcare […]
Jeanne Pinder
“In this report, we analyze transparency data released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to examine claims denials and appeals among issuers offering individual market coverage on healthcare.gov from 2015-2017,” Karen Pollitz, Cynthia Cox and Rachel Fehr write for the Kaiser Family Foundation, in a startling analysis of federal data that reveals […]
Jeanne Pinder
A comment came in on one of our “facility fee” posts, explaining this mysterious charge, imposed by hospitals on top of a bill for medical treatment if a patient visits one of their facilities: “As of today, Jan. 30, 2019, this is still happening at Tulane Sports. I received a bill for $153.00 facility fee. […]
Jeanne Pinder
The share from the community member looked ominous: An IV, which usually means an emergency room. PROCEDURE: 96365 Ther/proph/diag iv inf init PRICES: CHARGED: 1200.0 INSURED: 0.0 PAID: 1200.0 HOSPITAL: Mount Sinai Beth Israel INSURER: Cigna OTHER INSURER: An employer I asked: Thanks for your share on ClearHealthCosts! We might want to write about this. […]
Jeanne Pinder
Who knew? When you tell the woman in billing department the price is too high, maybe she’ll drop it for you. The community member shared on our partner’s site about an MRI in Westlake Village, near Los Angeles — and we learned that when he told the office person he was not going to have […]
Jeanne Pinder
“The words ‘what do you have to declare?’ took on a bizarre meaning at a Canada-U.S. border crossing on Sunday,” Brad Hunter writes over at The Toronto Sun. “For a Quebec family, the answer was grandpa. TVA reports that around 2:30 a.m., a mother and her son returning from Florida arrived at the crossing at […]
Jeanne Pinder
A friend writes: Recently saw Jeanne’s superb TED talk.. and was instantly inspired to share our recent ER experience. Please see attached the bill we got for a visit to the NYU Langone Cobble Hill ER in November for my 14-year-old son who was having severe chest pains and racing pulse ( turned out nothing […]
Jeanne Pinder
We got amazing reactions to our founder’s TED Talk. Here’s the TED.com Facebook post on the day it went live, with 800-plus shares and more than 2,000 reactions It was around the top 10 or 20 percent as measured by shares and reactions over the past few weeks. A few weeks later, TED posted about […]
Jeanne Pinder
By ERIN BRICKER (Editor’s note: Erin Bricker reached out to us via our interactive software to talk about health costs, and we struck up a conversation. I asked her to write about her experiences, and she agreed, in the hope that someone else would benefit from her knowledge.) In the last 20 years or so, […]
