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My wife is in the other room trying to set up a conference call between a hospital administrator and our insurance company so that the insurance company will recognize a doctor as in-network, saving us hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars on a necessary procedure for our son.
She's been working on this for days. The hospital and the insurance company aren't used to dealing with each other in a situation like this, so they've essentially offloaded all the administrative work on to us. Medical codes. Institution ID codes. Exception codes. Waiver codes.
It's absolutely infuriating. We have to become experts in reams of bureaucratic arcana just to ensure that a medically necessary procedure for our son won't be financially ruinous. It's a huge waste of time for everybody involved.
Multiple layers of red tape stand between my son and the treatment he needs. The way the system is set up, the onus is on us to figure out how to guide him through it. How many person hours each year, I wonder, are spent by patients navigating healthcare bureaucracies?
What's the opportunity cost of that? And even worse, how many people just give up, decide they don't have the money for the treatment or the time it takes to figure out how to pay? It's maddening.
