Tuesday, July 6, 2021

What Will the Hospital Visit Cost?

 Most of Jackson's hospitals are now posting their prices online.  The Trump administration forced hospitals to publish the prices they charge insured and  non-insured patients at the beginning of this year.   Needless to say,  hospitals were not too happy about the new rule.  The new rule also applied to drug costs but Big Pharma is fighting the federal government in court.  Are Jackson's hospitals posting their prices online?   See for yourself. 

 

 Mississippi Baptist Medical Center - Jackson

Mississippi Baptist Medical Center places the portal right at the top of the home page.  


 The next step is choosing either a "guest navigator" or "expense navigator." 

Selecting the expense navigator yields the following result. 

"Colonoscopy and biopsy" is selected from the list of procedures.   "No insurance" is selected so we can see what the cash price is for the procedure. MBMC quotes a price of $7,798 for the procedure but there is a selection for the non-insured at the bottom of the page. Select "estimate for out of pocket expenses" and then "next."  On the next page, select "none" for "insurance type" and then "next" to get the cash estimate. 

The website states a list of all procedures and costs can be downloaded: 

To obtain a machine-readable list of these standard charges from the Charge Description Master (CDM) or by Diagnosis Related Group (DRG) for our Baptist Memorial Hospital facilities in West Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas, please choose one of the selections below.

However, there is one slight problem with the list.  MBMC published it in notepad format.  Good luck reading that wall of text.  

University of Mississippi Medical Center - Jackson

UMC's pricing is easy to find on its website as well. 

 

The next page provides separate portals to guests and current patients.  Selecting the guest portal reveals this page: 


Selecting "colonoscopy and biopsy" and "non-insured" reveals: 


Although it appears the procedure is double that of MBMC, keep in mind the UMMC estimate may include additional services.  UMMC also provides a list of prices in an Excel spreadsheet that is much easier to read but it is looooong with 6,817 entries. Click on link. Don't get lost.


St. Dominic Hospital

St. Dominic's website is a little trickier to navigate.  Select the "patients & visitors" tab at the top of the page and then select "patient guide."  


The website doesn't contain fancy portals that allow you to customize your search.  Nope.  The IT Solons at St. D. instead provide an Excel spreadsheet with over 12,000 entries but the spreasheet does compare prices among the uninsured and various insurance plans.  Abandon all hope ye who dare to read this spreadsheet.  JJ is not grading the hospitals but if it were, St. D would get a "F". 


Merit Health River Oaks

Merit has a pricing tool but it is buried in the website.  Click here to access estimate tool.


Notable Hospitals Around Mississippi

Forrest General (Hattiesburg).  It posted an online tool  very similar to UMC's portal.  

 North Mississippi Medical Center (Tupelo). The website has an estimate portal but it requires the reader to provide some personal information such as name, email address, and expected date of service. 

Anderson Regional Medical Center (Meridian).  The hospital as a  cost estimator tool but it is more cumbersome to use than some of the other websites.  Anderson requires patients to enter their names and other information to obtain an estimate. 

Singing River Health System (Gulf Coast):  The estimator tool is buried worse than on other hospital websites but it is there.

Delta Regional Medical Center (Greenville).   Delta buried the price estimate section on the website but it uses the same price estimator as Anderson. 

King's Daughters Medical Center (Brookhaven).  Pricing is placed under the "about" tab at the top of the page.  Click here.

Kingfish note: This is pretty good info for consumers.  If only there was a Mississippi columnist who wrote about health care every so often and served on hospital boards.  If only....  


18 comments:

Anonymous said...

Kingfish - Are you computer retarded? The “notepad” file you mention from Baptist... it’s a “pipe” delimited file that can easily be imported in to Excel (or Google sheets) and can easily be sorted/read.

Nevermind. 99% of Mississippians wouldn’t know how to do that.

Kingfish said...

You proved my point. The purpose of the rule is to make hospital pricing transparent for everyone.

How many people are going to know how to do what you just said?

Anonymous said...

10:32AM
Don't underestimate basic computer literacy.

Anonymous said...

@11:23, BS. 99% of the public hasn't a clue about what to do with a delimited file.

Anonymous said...

They should just use google docs so that nobody is required to have excel installed. Treatment isn’t privileged info protected by HIPAA.

Anonymous said...

What year pricing information is posted for St. Dominic's? Aetna has not been the hospital employee provider recently with BCBS of Louisiana now the provider since the Our Lady By the Lake group out of Louisiana took over.

Anonymous said...

10:32 - It's not 99% of Mississippians who wouldn't know what to do with that file, it's 99% of human beings.

Computers exist to remove as many menial barriers as possible, like specialized knowledge or abundant free time, from performing necessary tasks.

If instead of making your data intuitive to access, you decided to put the burden on laypeople to retain yet another arcane technical detail and recall it at the right moment, you're a bad/lazy designer.

That would be me said...

I have my hand raised to confess. I be some kind of stupid when it comes to the computer thing. Really, about most anything.

Anonymous said...

I'd venture to say 90% of those getting capped in Jacktown don't have insurance so they don't care. They ain't paying no bill.

Anonymous said...

They should be required to publish not their "sticker price" but what they actually receive from insurers, including any end=of-year additions. In may cases they never receive what they list on your bill as the cost.

Anonymous said...

While I hate to agree with the Biden administration, I think requiring hospitals to compete for business is a long overdue requirement. It is a pity that they had to be required to do this. Health care costs in this country will continue to skyrocket until consumers have the ability to choose where they will go. Consumers can't make that decision if they have no idea what they will be charged. Even if consumers have insurance, there is almost always going to be a co-pay, deductible, or whatever else, so this information is important if only to try to minimize what will have to be paid out of pocket.

Kingfish said...

Like it or not, it's a Trump rule. It began before the inauguration. You can hate him and still admit its a good rule. ;-)

Anonymous said...

I guess we don’t have to be loyal to one hospital system anymore. You don’t see your own doctor or anyone that actually knows about your medical history since most (all?) hospitals employ hospitalists.

Anonymous said...

st Dominics and Aetna very nearly cost me my home and business 30 years ago. After carefully jumping through every hoop, dotting every "I" and crossing every "T" the hospital's admissions office overlooked some technicality on the Sunday admission which wasn't discovered by Aetna until after the surgery. With complications the total bill was astronomical and I was left paying over 50%.

If not for the generosity of the 2 major vendors serving my business I would have been forced to shut down and liquidate.

Anonymous said...

Kingfish at 11:37 pm, I DO HATE TRUMP.
But I hate Big Pharma, medical insurance and the medical "system" greed much more.

Anonymous said...

St. D's approach to this seems kinda sinful to me. Any idea how they can be motivated or forced to better comply?

Anonymous said...

2:52, Yeah St. D's policy stinks but so does your cheap shot at Catholicism by calling the lousy policy sinful. Fine, go to a Muslim hospital? Oh yeah, there aren't any. How about a Hindu hospital? None of those either. Buddhist? Nope.

The stinko policies of St. D, Baptist Health (which is separate from the Baptist Church), as well as Methodist and Presbyterian hospitals is not due to doctrine but more due to allowing wonky corporate beancounters to take over. That is the sin of these churches that will concede.

But at least these churches cared enough about people to enter healthcare many decades.

Anonymous said...

As much as I hate that evil racist neo-fascist dictator Donald Trump it makes me sick to stomach to admit all the good things he did.


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