This is Part One of a Two-Part Series
If one issue exemplifies health equity, it’s the cost of healthcare itself and the differential impact of it on your hourly employees. They say you’re not supposed to start a blog post with statistics, but these statistics are too important to ignore:
50% of Americans now carry medical debt
18% of people have medical debt in collections, while…
…137 million people report problems paying medical bills
Half of all Americans don’t have enough savings for emergencies
Many of those employees could be yours. Indeed, overcoming the threat and fear of medical bankruptcy could be the #1 health equity issue your company faces, and one of the top stress issues as well.
Nonprofits that raise money to pay off medical debts may possibly dent this problem for your employees who already have bills in arrears, but Quizzify can help you put a major dent in onerous medical bills, and fears of those bills, going forward.
That’s because, uniquely, Quizzify is doing something about high medical bills. Specifically, our ER Sticker Shock Prevent Consent “solves” this problem. “Solves” is in quotes for two reasons:
1. We can’t make the problem go away, and
2. The Quizzify Prevent Consent doesn’t apply to elective care.
But we can make the emergency care billing problem kinda sorta go away. Let’s put it this way. While you probably can’t remember the last time you saw an allowed ER claim with fewer than four figures, we can and do guarantee (for our customers) that these 29 words in the Quizzify Prevent Consent keep virtually 100% of ER bills in the three figures:
"Superseding other consents, I consent to responsibility (including insurance) for up to 2x Medicare following receipt of an itemized bill for appropriate treatment coded at the correct Level."
Likewise, you probably rarely see an allowed emergency admission claim that didn’t have at least five figures. We contractually guarantee that the large majority, though far from all such admissions, will be in the four figures. This includes COVID admissions.
The differences in the deductibles and co-pays for those emergency bills, well into the hundreds or thousands of dollars, are the differences between belt-tightening and financial hardship for many if not most of your hourly employees.
Talk about health equity!
Why the Quizzify Prevent Consent Works
By way of background, here's how/why the Quizzify Prevent Consent works. In 1986, a federal law was passed, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), to prevent hospitals from “dumping,” as it was called back then. After 1986, hospitals could no longer turn away patients based on ability to pay. Instead, they had to treat every emergency visit, delivery and admission that came in the door.
In the case of emergency visits, there should no longer be, and generally no longer is, any difference whatsoever in treatment based on ability to pay. Once inside the facility, the treating physicians and nurses have no way of knowing who is paying what. And it would be illegal for them to treat people differently if they did know.
In the case of admissions, EMTALA doesn’t require the hospital to keep a patient for the entire stay whose payment method they don’t like. Once the patient has been stabilized, the patient could be transferred. EMTALA also allows transfer for ER visits following stabilization and for emergency deliveries following birth, but that rarely if ever happens.
EMTALA did not curb hospitals’ ability to force patients to pay. Quite the opposite, many hospitals have doubled down on trying to make patients do exactly that, regardless of the impact on the patient.
Hence, the one-sided financial consents. More