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Those cases accounted for more than a quarter of all the state’s trauma team activations that year and were more than double the number of similar cases in 2014, according to an all-payer database of hospital claims kept by Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration. In Florida alone, where the number of trauma centers has exploded, hospitals charged such fees more than 13,000 times in 2019 even though the patient went home the same day, according to a KHN analysis of state data provided by Etienne Pracht, an economist at the University of South Florida. Tens of thousands of times a year, hospitals charge enormously expensive trauma alert fees for injuries so minor the patient is never admitted. The case, buried in the records of a 2017 trial, is a rare example of a courtroom challenge to something billing consultants say is increasingly common at U.S. Sutter Health Memorial Medical Center charged $44,914 including an $8,928 “trauma alert” fee, billed for summoning the hospital’s top surgical specialists and usually associated with the most severely injured patients. A hospital in Modesto, California, treated a 30-year-old man for shoulder and back pain after a car accident. Originally published at Kaiser Health News
#CALIFORNIA HOSPITALS TRAUMA CENTER LEVELS CRACK#
Unfortunately, the perps are so shameless that mere press exposes likely won’t do much by themselves, at least until they force legislators to crack down.īy Jay Hancock, Kaiser Health News Senior Correspondent, who wrote previously for The Baltimore Sun, The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk and the Daily Press of Newport News. Is it just me, or is Kaiser Health News spending a lot more time covering medical industry scams? Given the relentless upward march of health care costs, one has to assume that a rise in MBA-designed monstrosities like trauma center price-gouging is what’s driving greater media attention.