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Dear Editor:
As someone who deals with numbers for a living, it really bothers me when I see things that do not add up as they should, especially when it comes to billing.
Healthcare costs are something that always seem to rise for unnecessary reasons. I hear horror stories from friends and business owners about how expensive healthcare costs have become and the difficulty of providing health insurance for their employees as healthcare costs continue to rise.
Indiana has made some progress in the past few years. Earlier this year, Indiana enshrined into law HB 1004, which will end one of the most predatory billing practices going on today. The bill bans “dishonest billing,” which occurs when hospitals bill patients for services and procedures provided at a doctor’s offices in their network as if the services were provided at the hospital’s main campus. Banning this underhanded revenue-inflating practice will lower medical bills for everyone with commercial insurance by protecting patients from receiving unnecessary facility fees on service they did not receive.
But there is still a lot more that can be done at both the state and federal level to protect Hoosier patients from being taken advantage of in their times of need. U.S. Senator Mike Braun and my Congresswoman Victoria Spartz have both spent their time in Washington and introduced bills to increase transparency surrounding healthcare prices and promote hospital competition in order to lower our costs. We need more politicians on both sides at every level to take up these fights because every person at some point in their lives will require medical attention regardless of their political affiliation.
Transparency in pricing is key to lowering healthcare costs as it increases accountability while driving competition and empowering patients to have all the information necessary to make the best decisions about their health. I have never met anyone who goes to the doctor knowing how much it will cost them, but I have too many friends and family members coming back home shocked about how much a necessary procedure will cost them.
Federal legislation similar to Rep. Spartz’s previously introduced “Transparency of Hospital Billing Act” could fix this major issue facing Americans across the country.
As of 2021, only three out of 10 of the nation’s physicians are practicing in independent medical practices, leaving nearly 70 percent of U.S. physicians employed by monopoly hospitals or other corporate entities. When these major hospitals are able to enter a local market and buy up all of competing hospitals and physician practices, they can start charging egregious price markups to abuse their market dominance since in many areas there are no other hospital systems for Hoosiers to turn to.
I have been encouraged to hear elected officials, such as Senator Braun and Rep. Spartz, speak about the danger of monopoly hospitals, along with the lack of competition currently in the marketplace, and hope all our politicians follow their lead to fix these issues.
This is not an unfixable issue and there is still much more to be done. We must continue the fight to lower healthcare costs across the state and the country.
I urge all our elected officials at the state and federal level, regardless of party affiliation to continue fighting for us to have the highest quality healthcare possible at the lowest possible cost.
David Goldberg
Carmel