Health care — and how much it costs — is scary. But you’re not alone with this stuff, and knowledge is power. “An Arm and a Leg” is a podcast about these issues, and is co-produced by KFF Health News.
Hospital facility fees. They can feel like a charge just for walking in the door. Hospitals say they go toward overhead on facilities with lots of specialized equipment and staff, like emergency rooms.
But these fees and in recent years. And as hospitals buy up outpatient facilities, patients are starting to get charged facility fees for routine tests, procedures, and visits to the doctor’s office. In this episode of “An Arm and a Leg,” host Dan Weissmann speaks with Georgann Boatright, a retired speech pathologist from Oxford, Mississippi, who was told by her local hospital that she needed to pay an $8,000 “operating room fee” for a routine test.
She was determined not to get overcharged, even if it meant driving hours out of state to get the test someplace cheaper. Hey there! A couple of months ago, we asked you to help us report on a type of fee that seems to be sneaking onto more and more medical bills. They’re often called “facility fees.
” It’s like a cover charge just for walking in the door. And these kinds of fees are familiar to a lot of folks from places like emergency rooms, which do have a LOT of specialized equipment and staff in the facility behind that door. That’s basically the case for a cover charge: Once you get in the door, there.