Patients are Payers, Hospitals are Debt Collectors

In the past, hospitals worried about patients without insurance not paying their bills. Now the struggle is getting patients with insurance to pay their bills.

That’s thanks in large part to high-deductible health plans, which have increased burden on patients to cover their medical care.

Since 2009, the number of Americans with high-deductible health plans has risen by 22 percent. The higher out-of-pocket costs these plans entail mean greater difficulty for healthcare providers collecting reimbursement.

In short, it’s harder to collect from a patient than it is to collect from insurance.

The new patient-payer model has been especially hard on independent physicians, who consistently rank reimbursement pressures at the top of their greatest challenges. As a result, many independent physicians are joining larger health systems out of necessity.

Though uncompensated care reached its peak just before the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and dropped precipitously thereafter, it has shown an uptick in recent years.

And trying to get patients to pay their bills is in itself a revenue drain.

A recent study by the Journal of the American Medical Association found that primary care physicians at academic health systems lose a whopping 15 percent of their revenue due to billing work.

Hospitals are now investing tens of millions of dollars in solutions, ranging from billing software and patient call centers to programs that help patients understand their responsibility at the point of care.

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