{"id":4416,"date":"2024-04-18T07:00:12","date_gmt":"2024-04-18T07:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=4416"},"modified":"2024-04-18T07:24:12","modified_gmt":"2024-04-18T07:24:12","slug":"taking-account-of-rising-health-care-costs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=4416","title":{"rendered":"Taking Account of Rising Health Care Costs"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Have your out-of-network insurance bills skyrocketed? Chris Hamby, an investigative reporter for The Times, may have an explanation.<\/p>\n

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Navigating the health care system in the United States can often feel like being lost in a maze. What kind of doctor should I see? Who takes my insurance? What even is a co-pay, anyway?<\/p>\n

For that reason, Chris Hamby, an investigative reporter, has devoted much of his five-year career at The New York Times to guiding readers through such dizzying questions. His latest article, which was published online this month<\/a>, explored the complex subject of insurance bills.<\/p>\n

Last year, Mr. Hamby began investigating MultiPlan, a data firm that works with several major health insurance companies, including UnitedHealthcare, Cigna and Aetna. After a patient sees an out-of-network medical provider, the insurer often uses MultiPlan to recommend how much to reimburse the provider.<\/p>\n

Mr. Hamby\u2019s investigation revealed that MultiPlan and the insurers are incentivized to reduce payments to providers; in doing so, they score larger fees, which are paid by the patient\u2019s employer. Many patients are forced to foot the rest of the bill. (MultiPlan said in a statement to The Times that it uses \u201cwell-recognized and widely accepted solutions\u201d to promote \u201caffordability, efficiency and fairness\u201d by recommending a \u201creimbursement that is fair and that providers are willing to accept in lieu of billing plan members for the balance.\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In an interview, Mr. Hamby shared his experience poring over more than 50,000 pages of documents and interviewing more than 100 people. This conversation has been edited.<\/p>\n

Where did your investigation begin?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We were broadly looking at issues in health insurance last year. MultiPlan kept coming up in my conversations with physician groups, doctors and patients. At first, it was unclear what exactly MultiPlan did. There were some lawsuits<\/a> regarding its work with UnitedHealthcare, but it was difficult to understand the company\u2019s role in the industry. We eventually accumulated more information about MultiPlan\u2019s relationship with big insurance companies.<\/p>\n

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Have your out-of-network insurance bills skyrocketed? Chris Hamby, an investigative reporter for The Times, may have an explanation.Navigating the health care system in the United States can often feel like being lost in a maze. What kind of doctor should I see? Who takes my insurance? What even is a co-pay, anyway?For that reason, Chris Hamby, an investigative reporter, has devoted much of his five-year career at The New York Times to guiding readers through such dizzying questions. His latest article, which was published online this month, explored the complex subject of insurance bills.Last year, Mr. Hamby began investigating MultiPlan, a data firm that works with several major health insurance companies, including UnitedHealthcare, Cigna and Aetna. After a patient sees an out-of-network medical provider, the insurer often uses MultiPlan to recommend how much to reimburse the provider.Mr. Hamby\u2019s investigation revealed that MultiPlan and the insurers are incentivized to reduce payments to providers; in doing so, they score larger fees, which are paid by the patient\u2019s employer. Many patients are forced to foot the rest of the bill. (MultiPlan said in a statement to The Times that it uses \u201cwell-recognized and widely accepted solutions\u201d to promote \u201caffordability, efficiency and fairness\u201d by recommending a \u201creimbursement that is fair and that providers are willing to accept in lieu of billing plan members for the balance.\u201d)In an interview, Mr. Hamby shared his experience poring over more than 50,000 pages of documents and interviewing more than 100 people. This conversation has been edited.Where did your investigation begin?We were broadly looking at issues in health insurance last year. MultiPlan kept coming up in my conversations with physician groups, doctors and patients. At first, it was unclear what exactly MultiPlan did. There were some lawsuits regarding its work with UnitedHealthcare, but it was difficult to understand the company\u2019s role in the industry. We eventually accumulated more information about MultiPlan\u2019s relationship with big insurance companies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4418,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4416"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4419,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4416\/revisions\/4419"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}