GPA Email Touts Cost Plus – Cites Baylor Medical Center’s Billing Practices

We received the following email from Group & Pension Administrators (GPA) this morning. GPA started Cost Plus Health Insurance four years ago in Texas, and has since expanded their client base nationally utilizing this concept:

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Attached is a link to an article by The Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit, non partisan news organization. The article describes the billing practice of one of the Dallas – Fort Worth metroplex hospitals in billing Medicare at the most expensive level of emergency care. The article states “In 2008, the hospital billed Medicare for the two most expensive levels of care for eight of every 10 patients it treated and released from its emergency room – almost twice the national average,” The hospital president says they didn’t return any of the overcharges and a hospital spokesperson stated their charges were accurate in the context of the billing guidelines at that time, the hospital has since reigned in their charges since 2009. This raises the logical question of whether the overcharging was also done to patients under insured and self funded plans. This is another example why Cost Plus is the solution to these practices.”

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2012/09/20/10811/hospitals-grab-least-1-billion-extra-fees-emergency-room-visits