Everybody has been financially ‘raked over the coals’ by the healthcare industry. The business practices and tactics that industry uses to get your money have cost some folks their life savings. Healthcare often takes money from you that it doesn’t deserve. It usually does so without delivering what you deserve. The Heart of a Doctor Project teaches you how to beat healthcare crooks at their own game. We will have blogs, commentaries, essays, manuals, videos, and even a book on how to ‘beat the (healthcare) house.”
As a start, let’s talk about one of the most harmful, obvious, and common ways that healthcare sometimes cheats you. I call it “The Squeeze.” In this topic section, I’ll describe what the squeeze is, how to know when you are in it, and spend lose thousands of dollars that you shouldn’t have to pay.
Here is the scenario:
You’re a forty-year woman. You’ve been having horrible right upper quadrant abdominal pain with vomiting and diarrhea in the middle of the night for the past three weeks. You’ve already been to the ER twice. The symptoms, examination, lab tests, and ultrasound suggest that you need your gallbladder out. You can’t stand to have one more attack of this, one more ER bill, or one more lost day at work. You walk into a new surgeon’s office – the one that your primary care doctor got you into. The office is really busy, and at the check-in desk, the clerk barely looks at you and says, “You license and insurance card?” She takes those and then hands you a clipboard with a whole set of papers. She says “Fill these out and bring them back to me. They’ll call you in a minute.”
While you are sitting down, squeezed in between other patients in a crowded waiting room, you are going through the papers on the clipboard. You are trying to understand the complicated legal documents and squinting to make out the words in tiny little print. At that moment, you hear an assistant call your name as she impatiently holds open the door to the clinic area where you assume you are supposed to go. You hurriedly sign the rest of the papers without looking at then, much less understanding what you just committed to, and pass them back to the lady at the desk.
You agreed to pay whatever the clinic wants whenever they decide how much that is. The reality is that the costs will be a little bit hidden because you don’t know how bad it will be for a month or two. For sure, you have just given that business the legal right to charge you whatever they choose for whatever they want. And you have no right of appeal or anything like it. And you won’t know what it costs for months. Does that sound familiar? Does that sound fair?
Their Goal(s):
To get you to sign a document that you wouldn’t endorse under any other circumstance whatsoever. A document that it’s unethical and probably illegal to make you sign if they couldn’t slip it past you. You wouldn’t sign it if you were applying for a job, writing your will, or taking out a loan. Why would you sign it now? You wouldn’t. So, the game is to get you to sign it now when your health is in question or even at stake get it done fast when you don’t have time to review it or protest. And they reinforce it with the subtle implication that since this is healthcare, you should “trust us.”
Your goal(s):
First, understand that you are in their territory. That doesn’t mean that you have to be at their mercy. Be fair and only accept fair. Make reasonable commitments for good service and keep them. But sign nothing at all without ‘healthy’ due diligence. Remember, your signature is your commitment. Only the doctor took an oath to count you first. Until they prove otherwise, you must assume that anybody who hands you any paperwork is there to get your money and get home by five-thirty. This kind of person is not your friend, loved one, or trusted associate. You have no reason whatsoever to trust any of them. And they don’t trust you. If they did trust you and they really did care, why would they slip this open-ended limitless contract in between your health history and your private information? Why would the do that at precisely the moment when you’re too sick to comprehend any of it?
In the next blog in this series, I’m going to give you a step-by-step guide to recognizing and managing “The Squeeze.”