At a followup visit a year after Elizabeth Moreno had a disk removed to successfully treat her crippling pain, her doctor asked her to leave a urine sample; a few months later, Sunset Labs LLC of Houston sent her a bill for $17,800.
Moreno's doctor had seemingly ordered the urine test to ensure that she hadn't abused her post-operative opioid pain medication, but he didn't just order tests for opioids: he also asked the lab to check for indicators of "cocaine, methadone, anti-anxiety drugs and several other drugs she had never heard of" including amphetamines and PCP.
Those unnecessary tests could certainly raise the price on a simple urine test, but it gets worse because of Sunset Labs' crazy price-gouging: the amphetamine test was $1,700 and the PCP test was $425. The lab also charged an eye-popping $850 for a pair of simple tests meant to detect tampering with the sample.
Blue Shield refused to pay the bill, and also advised Moreno that in their opinion, the services rendered were worth about $100, not $17,800.
As doctors have become more cautious about opioid addiction, the use of routine urine drug tests has increased. This has led to a bonanza for sleazy, price-gouging testing labs, who are on the receiving end of a golden shower of riches.
Moreno's father is an MD; he settled with the lab for $5,000 and filed a complaint with the Texas AG for "price gouging of staggering proportions."
How a urine test after back surgery triggered a $17,800 bill [Fred Schulte/Kaiser Health News]
(via Naked Capitalism)
(Image: Mario Hains, CC-BY-SA)
Binding arbitration agreements were formalized in 1925, allowing two corporate entities of roughly equal size to resolve their disputes outside of a court, saving both parties a lot of money, but since then, the primary use of arbitration is to force employees, customers, patients and other comparatively weak parties to surrender their right to sue […]
Emergency rooms at for-profit hospitals are notorious price-gougers, where an ice-pack and a bandage can cost $5,000, and where no one will tell you how much your care is costing until months after the fact.
In 2017, Pricewaterhousecooper published Using science fiction to explore business innovation, a guide for corporations that wanted to work with sf writers to think about the future of their businesses; it was part of a wave of corporate interest in the insights of sf writers, which also coincides with a parallel trend in academia (see, […]
Take a scroll through any app marketplace and you’ll see that the doors are wide open for any game these days – and any game developer. Like any creation, virtual or analog, it all starts with an idea. And if you’ve got one of those, the Complete Unity Game Developer Bundle can walk you the […]
At the rate the world is shrinking, you don’t need to be a globetrotter for a second language to be a useful skill. And if you’re looking to learn that second language (or a third, or fourth), uTalk Language Education is the learning program that makes progression not only easy but fun. If you can’t […]
Smokers on the go can breathe a little easier. With an innovative, easy-loading spiral design, the Twisty Glass Blunt offered a smoother, more consistent draw than conventional pipes. Now the Twisty Glass Mini delivers the benefits of its heavy-duty sister pipe in a more discreet package. For those that haven’t already made the Twisty Glass […]
