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Can anyone tell me what the hospital gets paid for for MRIs for Medicare patients?
"Hospitals typically charge more for everything, since they’re trying to spread the costs from enormously expensive services such as emergency rooms across the entire operation. Insurance companies understand that if a patient shows up overdosed in the ER and is tested for drugs in the hospital lab, that test will be much more expensive than if the test were mailed from, say, an employment office to a stand-alone lab company.
And they pay it. Durall’s private lab company would typically receive $100 to $300 from Blue Cross for a specimen test, the suit says. Chestatee got more than $1,400."
Hospitals are paid off a different schedule for urine tox too. All it takes is a couple of "de-prescribers" ordering UDS and writing Subs on high risk patients and a hospital can stay comfortably in the black even on a Medicaid pro-forma.
The site of service differential is a moral hazard and physicians should oppose it. Ask your specialty society's to support site neutral payment policies.
Missed the big story. He owns the hospital, and the UDS lab in Florida. Stark raving mad.
RICO?The owner is an attorney. Stark doesn’t cover attorneys. The employed MD’s at the clinics and rehab centers were enriching his bottom line. The attorney-owner was simply using his hospital license as a ticket to practice revenue arbitrage using site of service differentials. This is why doctors should own hospitals not lawyers.