Within the last two days, I received a bill for my glasses and read a post by a friend ranting about medical billing mistakes. This is a huge problem that is so common that it could be considered the norm. It is ridiculously expensive and could probably be fixed.

My exposure to medical bills has been through patients who show them to me, hoping I can make sense of them, my occasional foray into the world of being a healthcare consumer and the woes of friends and family. I can say, with confidence, that I have never read a medical bill that I understood. When I do choose to dig a bit deeper, overcharging and errors are more common than not.

It is very hard to get good statistics on this, but the lower end of what I’m seeing suggests that one in 10 bills contain errors. It’s probably higher than that.

Common billing errors include being billed for procedures that were cancelled, being billed twice for the same thing, under different names, being billed for a more complex version of what was actually done and being billed for more time than was actually spent. How do these happen? In general, the errors aren’t deliberate fraud.

Frequently staff in the billing office do not talk to doctors but produce bills based on what the doctors write. Doctors don’t document what happened right away if they are busy and so by the time they do make a note, details are often fuzzy. In the case of billing for canceled procedures, the only paper trail available to billers may be the order for the test, and the cancelation may have been communicated by voice, on the fly. When doctors do bill for themselves, it may be difficult to find the correct code, so, in a hurry, we just settle on the first one that resembles what we did. Most of us are not interested in getting better at billing because we hate it. We weren’t trained to do it, and it takes us away from patient care.

Patients often (but certainly not always) know what did happen. Their bills, though, are written in some long forgotten Martian dialect that makes it really difficult to correct the errors.

My bill for glasses, which turns out to have been correct (after two phone calls) is a good example of what is wrong with medical bills. I apparently owed $137 for “lens sphcyl bifocal 4.00d/0.1, and $155 for “progressive lens per lens” and also more money for “lens polycar or equal” (which I would have assumed was my lens sphcyl, but I guess not), also the anti-reflective coating and a miscellaneous vision service and a miscellaneous product which apparently meant that they charged to drill a hole in the lens and polish it. Sales tax I could figure out on my own.

Also, the bill didn’t say anything about insurance, which does pay some portion, and the biller was not planning to submit it. A separate bill has arrived detailing the cost for my exam, also written in some language that I don’t speak. The bills are dated a week apart, for unclear reasons. Theoretically I should be pretty well positioned to understand this sort of thing, after three decades in the medical field. I’m guessing others, who might be less educated, sicker, more fatigued or less assertive would simply give up and not check the bill at all.

My friend’s issue was being billed for copays that he actually paid at the time of service, then getting notices that he was delinquent for not paying them, having to call the billing office multiple times and eventually having to appear in person in order to get it fixed.

Because billing in excess of services usually leads to making more money, there is no real economic incentive to do this right. A responsive and intelligent problem solver in the billing office may actually lose the practice money, if he or she uses the relevant skills to solve customer complaints. The only economic reason to reduce inadvertent overbilling is to avoid being caught and penalized by insurance companies. There are definitely medical billing specialists who delight in doing their jobs accurately, but there is no cash reward for this sort of behavior.

The most effective first step toward taking care of the problem would be a requirement (it could even be a law) that medical bills be descriptive enough that regular people can actually understand them. The affordable care act made health insurance companies describe their services in ways that average people could know what they were buying. If people could actually read and understand their bills, they could see if they were correct. We could even tack on to the law a time limit for resolution of a query. Wouldn’t it be sweet if a billing question would be fielded in 24 hours and resolved in a week? That doesn’t sound too difficult.

The whole issue of medical billing is, of course, wrong in a very big way, since its existence is based on fee for service. As long as providers can make more money for doing more things and more complex and difficult things, there will be economic pressure to do more intense medicine on more people, thus creating more people who have been medicalized into being sick. We do, though, have fee for service medicine at present, so it’s time to support the (not yet written) Medical Bill Clarity Act of 2015.

Janice Boughton is a physician who blogs at Why is American health care so expensive?

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