NEW YORK TIMES: Before his three-hour neck surgery for herniated disks in December, Peter Drier, 37, signed a pile of consent forms. A bank technology manager who had researched his insurance coverage, Mr. Drier was prepared when the bills started arriving: $56,000 from Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, $4,300 from the anesthesiologist and even $133,000 from his orthopedist, who he knew would accept a fraction of that fee.
He was blindsided, though, by a bill of about $117,000 from an “assistant surgeon,” a Queens-based neurosurgeon whom Mr. Drier did not recall meeting…
In operating rooms and on hospital wards across the country, physicians and other health providers typically help one another in patient care. But in an increasingly common practice that some medical experts call drive-by doctoring, assistants, consultants and other hospital employees are charging patients or their insurers hefty fees. They may be called in when the need for them is questionable. And patients usually do not realize they have been involved or are charging until the bill arrives… (more)
EDITOR: There are a lot of conscientious doctors. But then there are a bunch of who consider themselves entitled to become multi-millionaires at the expense of the dysfunctional U. S. health care system, one of the few in the world where doctors and hospitals can charge patients whatever they choose.
The practice isn’t just limited to doctors and dentists.
The monopolistic, almost obscenely profitable and unresponsive to the public Lancaster General has its hands in the pockets of virtually every Lancaster family in the indirect form of the much higher health insurance costs than otherwise would occur.
