Billing Manager
Shawnee Mission Physicians Group
Georgetown Family Care
7301 Frontage Road, Suite 100
Shawnee Mission, KS 66204
July 21, 2011
Dear Shawnee Mission Physicians Group:
I recently received a bill from your Chicago-based medical billing service for the amount of $88.13 for the June 7 consultation I had with Dr. Buss.
Let’s set aside for a moment the fantasical retail price of $173 mentioned on the bill, as well as the existence of the equally made-up $60 “discount” by which being covered by Cigna health plan supposedly lowers that literally incredible starting price that no one actually pays. That still means my ten-minute chat with Dr. Buss now has me on the hook for my original co-pay of $25 PLUS an additional $88.13!
I understand that running a medical facility in a country with the “best healthcare system in the world” (for now, at least) is not cheap. I realize you have expenses to cover, utilities, insurance, salaries, etc. I know there are non-paying patients you still have to cover, that those of us who have money and insurance are ultimately subsidizing. I appreciate the education, experience, and personalized care that Dr. Buss and your other physicians provide. But $113 for ten minutes of talk? Wow!
We all know that the costs of healthcare in the US—thanks to the removal of market forces that once directly connected consumers and suppliers of such services, and the domination of payment by third-party payers—have become completely unmoored from reality. But retailing a ten-minute consultation for $173 and sticking the patient with $113 of that amount enters us all into a new realm of out-of-touch medical pricing and breathtakingly audacious opportunism.
I am not writing because I don’t have the money or can’t pay the bill. I am writing because I want to send a small but direct message to those I encounter in the medical supply chain that some of us won’t simply roll over and accept having to pay ridiculous amounts like this. And I want to urge those of you who are members of both the medical management and physician communities to take whatever steps you can to reform the system along market-based, consumer-driven lines outlined by the Cato Institute, rather than the top-down control-and-command socialized-bureaucracy model we are surely as a nation slipping into.
We are a family that pays its bills, recognizes the cost of receiving first-class service, and wants those we do business with to prosper. We don’t go around expecting freebies. But we do watch our spending and didn’t get to a position of modest financial security by throwing our money away. The additional $88 you are requesting for my ten-minute office visit represents a week of groceries for our family, and I’m not going to simply write a check like that without reminding you that behind your charts and tables and spreadsheets of billing formulas are real people—not just faceless bureaucrats in an insurance company or a government reimbursement office.
I am willing to send you a check for an additional $25, bringing the total payment for my ten-minute visit to $50. If you insist on collecting the other $63, I guess our next encounter will be in collections—or, once we start avoiding coming in to ask the doctor about everyday concerns because of its astronomical price—the emergency room.
If you agree, I would appreciate you officially making the adjustment and sending a new invoice.
I am sharing this letter electronically with my friends and family, and it will be on my consumer advocacy blog for anyone searching the internet for “Shawnee Mission, “Shawnee Mission Physicians Group” or “Georgetown Family Care” to find. Your response (or non-response) can write the final chapter of this story however you want it to be, and I will share your response with my friends, family members, and blog readers.
Nothing about this letter should be read as dissatisfaction with the care I receive at Shawnee Mission’s facilities, or the physicians of Georgetown. But it is a means of illustrating how out of touch our third-party-payer-driven system has become not just in regard to the cost of sophisticated, expensive-to-develop pharmaceuticals and complex diagnostic procedures—but even the delivery of a simple, ten-minute consultation.
Respectfully yours,
The eValue-ator
[real name / real address]
cc: Dr. Matthew Buss
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