Jeanne Pinder
“As I noted in my last post, UnitedHealth Group made more profits last year than any health insurer has ever made for its shareholders — and considerably more than Wall Street financial analysts had expected,” Wendell Potter writes over at his Substack, Wendell Potter NOW. “Investors were so impressed they rushed to buy shares of […]
Jeanne Pinder
The new federal price transparency law is rolling out Jan. 1, 2021, mandating that hospitals have to list prices on their web sites. Describing the new rules, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services say on their website: “Hospital price transparency helps Americans know the cost of a hospital item or service before receiving it. […]
Jeanne Pinder
A contributor to one of my online communities, Scott Haas, wrote this to the group the other day in the context of what happens behind the scenes in health insurance. His note primarily concerns the Medical Loss Ratio formula and the way it was changed by the Affordable Care Act — and the role of […]
Jeanne Pinder
A community member shared with us the bare bones of a story: Two MRI bills at an imaging center in Scarborough, Maine, resulted in a bill for $2,380. “Doctor advised ‘spinal MRI’, no indication given that procedure would be expensive or be billed separately for thoracic and lumbar regions of the spine,” wrote the community […]
Jeanne Pinder
(Updated 2022) We’re always interested in seeing who’s visiting. Today, someone from UnitedHealthCare in Plymouth, Minn., spent 6 minutes reading our post about sleep study costs. Here’s a screenshot from our Clicky analytics panel. We’re happy to be providing such valuable services to the insurance industry! It’s also clear that they found us by Googling. […]
Jeanne Pinder
(Updated 2022) A friend said recently that she needed to get allergy tests in the New York area, but she wasn’t certain they would be covered under her insurance. She was planning to make inquiries, and I asked her to keep notes on what the allergy tests cost. I told her I’d post them without using […]
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
We like it when we can educate the big incumbents in the health care arena. So when we see UnitedHealthcare spending so much time here, it makes us happy. Some of their searches: CPT vs. DRG, affordable psychotherapy, pulmonary compliance study, our “About” page, our “Team” page, a blog post about Massachusetts and Maryland as […]
Jeanne Pinder
Summary: How much does a brain MRI cost? Well, $250 or $1,850 — or $8,000. “Had a problem with high deductible insurance. I decided not to deal with the insurance and just pay out of my HSA. The bill said my balance was $1850.00, however it also had a handwritten amount of $250.00. Not sure […]
Jeanne Pinder
Summary: Very, very narrow networks are rising in popularity. These often seem to be formed by an incumbent insurance company (think Aetna or UnitedHealthcare) with a local health care system. This is an interesting phenomenon, especially given the statements by UnitedHealthcare that it’s not making enough money on the health insurance plans under the Affordable […]
