"Unless you're a sophisticated health care customer, it is impossible to really navigate the system when it comes to facility fees."
Victoria Veltri
Hospital groups in Connecticut have defended the increasing practice of charging facility fees. These are charges that may be billed separately to patients, and vary depending on where the care was delivered.
State comptroller Kevin Lembo brought hospital officials before a public hearing because of concerns that consolidation of hospital groups has led to rising costs to both the state and individual patients.
Healthcare Advocate Victoria Veltri told lawmakers that her office has been receiving increasing numbers of complaints about arbitrary fees.
"You couldn’t derive what the fee was from the actual service that the patient was getting," Veltri said. "The fees seem to be across the spectrum. In some cases, we’ve had patients with $5000 facility fee charges, and $25.00 facility fee charges. And unless you’re a sophisticated health care customer, it is impossible to really navigate the system when it comes to facility fees."
Hospital officials who gave testimony pointed to the high cost of charity care, falling state reimbursements for Medicaid, and the increasing complexity of things like cancer care.
Patrick McCabe of Yale-New Haven Hospital said his system faces millions in shortfalls on care because of these factors.
"We are the largest provider of Medicaid services in the state of Connecticut, both in terms of percentages of patients that we treat on a daily basis, and the raw numbers of patients," McCabe said. "For those patients we get paid about 59 cents on the dollar of cost. So given those complexities, the place where that funding is made up is really on those privately insured patients."
Some health insurers may not cover facility fees, meaning patients can be left with big out of pocket expenses.
