Chargemaster Quotes
A curated collection of the best quotes about Chargemaster.
Top Quotes
“The higher the chargemaster markup over cost, the greater the potential for profit.”
“Of particular importance, other than in Maryland, hospitals are generally free to charge whatever they want in their chargemaster.”
“Much ink has been spilt bemoaning that incomprehensible foundation of hospital cost accounting and prices, the redoubtable chargemaster.”
“California is a unique state in that all hospitals are required to submit a copy of their chargemasters, which the state then posts online for all consumers and patients to see.”
“What a hospital is actually paid by an MCO, Medicare, or Medicaid is rarely even close to what is listed on the chargemaster. In fact, only the uninsured are subject to those charges.”
“Database of hospital chargemasters in California, Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development, State of California”
“To put it simply, the chargemaster system on which hospitals rely to set pricing and billing codes has a forty-year history of changes that has distorted the relationship between price and cost.”
“It has been common for hospitals to raise their chargemaster rates substantially each year in an effort to win higher reimbursement rates from health insurers. But the practice falls hard on uninsured patients, because most hospitals give no more than a 20-percent discount to the uninsured.”
“Handing consumers hospital chargemasters to help them 'shop' for the best deal is about as useful as handing them a scalpel and telling them to perform their own bypass surgery. Yet, the state of California in 2003 enacted a law requiring all hospitals to make their chargemasters publicly available.”
“There are no current measures in ObamaCare that will help Medicare and the private market gain better transparency on the "chargemaster" of hospitals and until this happens, there are many hospital executives who will continue to bring in enormous salaries at the expense of the market and consumers.”
“JPS doesn't publicize its costs or charges. Its chargemaster, which lists prices for thousands of different services, is public information for anyone requesting it. But chargemasters are written in codes that are hard to understand. And it wouldn't provide a comparison of prices of another hospital.”
“The Sisneros suit is a counterclaim to a civil case filed by ENMMC against him, for failure to pay a $12,730 hospital bill for treatment. The counterclaim accuses the hospital of inflating its chargemaster rates, or the standard costs for any given procedure, in an effort to engage in 'turbocharging'.”
“Several hospitals have made initial, defensible pricing investments to eliminate the most egregious perceived offenses--e.g., the $100 aspirin--item from their chargemasters. However, few hospitals have designed or adopted a charge-code-by-charge-code pricing methodology that is auditable, logical, and defensible.”
“Chargemasters contain laughably high prices that hospital administrators don’t even try to justify. (They don’t seem to know how they were set to begin with, and argue that they’re misleading because insurance companies always negotiate lower ones.) Yet people without insurance, or with too little insurance, often end up paying chargemaster prices.”
“Hospitals use a chargemaster to list the items involved in procedures performed at the hospital. A chargemaster contains the prices of all services, goods, and procedures for which a separate charge exists and is used to generate a patient's bill. Chargemaster information has traditionally been kept proprietary, but California via the Payers Bill of Rights has recently made its chargemaster available to the public.”
“Hospitals readily admit that chargemaster prices are inflated. That's because they are the starting point for negotiating the discounts given to private insurance plans in return for the volume of patients they send to a hospital. Those bloated chargemaster prices, however, are the numbers used to bill uninsured patients - many of whom will struggle to pay those bills and will get nasty collection letters if they don't.”
“Bills that include chargemaster prices are not a true reflection of actual price and if paid at the chargemaster list price would yield extremely large profits for the hospital. (50) It can be argued that because hospitals accept different payments from different payers for identical services, hospitals engage in price discrimination--the practice of charging different customers different prices for identical goods or services.”
“In addition to patients without insurance, hospitals also charged international visitors and patients with health plans through insurers that haven't negotiated hospital discounts approximately two and a half times the price offered to health insurers with discounts, the report estimates. These inflated bills base their prices on a hospital's chargemaster file, an undiscounted master list of the prices hospitals set for services.”