A surgeon and professor who has turned his focus to the issues of medical debt has recently released a new book that looks at the lengths hospitals have to go to in collecting unpaid bills while also profiling individuals and companies that are being innovating and “disrupting medical care to help solve root problems the industry faces,” according to a published report.
The book, The Price We Pay, was released Sept. 10 and was written by Dr. Marty Makary. His team traveled to 22 cities to interview individuals in the healthcare profession, including those on the revenue cycle management side of the industry.
Becker’s recently published a Q&A with Dr. Makary and included some interesting tidbits from his research and insights into how the medical debt crisis can be addressed. For example:
Q: What do you want hospital revenue cycle leaders to take away from your research?
MM: My goal is to create broad healthcare literacy with the book. I explain how hospital revenue cycle departments are often reasonable, if as a patient, you can engage with them. I would like for people working at hospitals to know that this healthcare billing crisis is no one person’s fault. It is a system that we inherited, and it’s a broken system. Knowing about the disruptors who are changing the way business is being conducted is exciting, and it’s good for people to know what’s on the horizon because people are getting hammered, and everyone has a story— even hospital employees themselves. Employees have said they’ve been affected by collections.There’s a tremendous amount of contempt, and areas of agreement are that we can do better and healthcare costs have spun out of control, but we can fix this. There’s no diabolical person in healthcare, and the purpose of the book was to say how it’s starting to change and where we need to get to, and the basic steps we need to get there. Restaurants responded [to calls for nutrition information on food], and we got nutrition labels. Similarly, price transparency will usher in quality transparency.
