health care costs

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra says health providers who have exploited a complicated system to charge exorbitant rates will have to bear their share of the cost — or close.

Congress passed a law last year to shield patients from surprise out-of-network medical charges. But many doctors in the House now say the way the law is to be implemented unfairly favors insurers.

An alternative to original Medicare, the private plans are run mostly by major insurers. A recent analysis estimates Medicare overpaid these insurers by $106 billion from 2010 through 2019.

A businessman from Dallas got a PCR test for the coronavirus at a suburban emergency room. The charge for his test was "egregious" but not illegal, say health care analysts. Here's what happened.

To realign the man's jaw and ease his chronic pain and high blood pressure, he would need two operations, the surgeon said. Both procedures went well, but the patient was shocked by the second bill.

A bicyclist competed in a race that could have landed him in the Olympics. Instead, he suffered the worst injuries in the 10 years he had raced on pro road teams. And then the bills came.

While false alarms are to be expected, such frequent charges for little if any treatment suggest some hospitals see the alerts as much as a money spigot as a clinical emergency tool, claims consultants say.

Because there are no caps on cost, consumers and insurers often get billed hundreds of dollars for the most reliable PCR test. Prices are rising and they can’t fight back.

The pandemic was the dominant — but not the only — health policy story of 2020. In this Kaiser Health News podcast, panelists look at some of the year's biggest non-coronavirus stories.

It was a surprise even for a family of lawyers. A process called "subrogation" began with a Nevada family's health insurer denying their claim for an ER visit after their 9-year-old fell off his bike.