Mattress fundraisers are a thing in my area of MA, and I’ve never understood it.
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Maybe buy a mattress or two and donate them to homeless shelters or something.
That would be a generous donation, I’m not sure everyone is as rich as you are to be able to do that.
:ducks:
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sounds bipolar
Yes Mattress fundraisers are a thing around here. Seems kinda weird to me.
I have a medical test at a hospital next week. They price they gave me is 75% higher than the high end of the range when I search google to see what it should cost. I tried to look up the cost in the public database that all hospitals have to provide now, but this is not one of the included services. I have googled other places and found it MUCH less expensive but I don’t think I can self refer and I’m only paying 20% anyway and I really don’t have time to be calling around. I just wish I knew why it is so much more expensive. I do know my price includes the cost of the specialist to interpret the results, and that’s probably not included in the prices I googled. But the price difference still seems ridiculous.
How these get negotiated is interesting. There is a ‘chargemaster,’ which is basically a list of services provided, along with the ‘allowed amount,’ or how much the insurance company is willing to pay. And, at least when I’ve been involved in these discussions, the focus is heavily skewed to looking at two aggregate numbers. One, what do we think revenue will be compared to last year? And two, what do we think revenue would be as a percent of Medicare - i.e. what is the revenue under the proposed deal divided by revenue if we input what Medicare pays us for the services.
What typically doesn’t get much scrutiny are individual line items, so it’s very possible that this is just something that’s been this way for a long time, and it’s not enough dollars to bubble to the top. I do see the top ten or so procedures by total cost get more heavily scrutinized. In my experience in oncology this was always $$$ drugs.
So, it’s possible this is just one random price in a list of thousands that is high for whatever reason. It’s also possible that this hospital has a fair amount of leverage, and they use that leverage to extract high prices from insurers.
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Yep, this is a thing. The reason from the school side is there is very little effort involved for the cut they get. The reason from the company side, per their pitch, is no fixed location overhead (not mentioned but fewer work days as well) and more motivated customers. They do a preview meeting with the kids and parents to encourage us to solicit family and friends to attend on top of the normal roadside signs. I think it has been at schools around here for 10 years or so. I have never shopped one to compare prices.
Yes, it’s one of those hospital “systems” so doctors from their system only refer within the system, etc. And there are 3 such systems that I know of in my city. None of them had the price listed for this service, so I was unable to compare.
My sister had a similar, but more involved, test earlier this year, and the price I’m paying is reasonable compared to what she paid.
It just frustrates me that there is still no real price transparency for hospitals. We all pay for that one way or another.
But I don’t have time to fight that battle today.
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My annoyed thought of the day: my MIL asked me to buy I Bonds for her. Which basically consisted of me asking her for her DL number, SSN, banking info, etc.
So she had to drag up all of this and text it to me, so that I could re-type it into the form. I couldn’t convince her that she could totally navigate the process.
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Call them and ask.
Is she able to take pictures and text them to you?
I have all my kids’ and wife’s DL on my phone as well as their SSNs
She did with the DLs. This is an ongoing battle. She will literally open the Amazon app, find something she wants, take a screen shot and send it to me.
Like, you’re in the app and found what you want. Your credit card is saved, and your address, it’s just extra steps this way.
At Thanksgiving I’m going to make her sit down and go through the last click to just order what she wants.
I meant take pics of teh DL, not screen shots. This way she didn’t ahve to type it all in.
She did take a pic of that, but typed in a bunch of stuff. At any rate, it’s annoying that I’m basically being asked to just input this stuff into a website.
They just said it was the rate negotiated with my insurance company. Pretty typical in my experience.
I stink at king-pawn endgames.
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Woke up at 3 am and could not go back to sleep. Again.
I have 48 unread threads but am too busy to read them.
Dealing with the DMV
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