The Problem of Undisclosed Doctors
We interrupt our virtual symposium on the new book by Omri Ben-Shahar and Carl E. Schneider, More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure, to bring you this news story about the dangers of non-disclosure. Sunday’s New York Times, features a front-page article about people who discover that doctors unknown to them assisted in their surgeries. The doctors are sometimes out of network, and the costs can be astronomical.
For example, the Times story begins by telling of surgery performed on Peter Dreier. Most of the bills that followed were expected, but there was a $117,000 bill from an “assistant surgeon” of whose existence Dreier claims to have been unaware. It sounds like Mr. Dreier was the rara avis who actually took advantage of medical disclosure forms to eductate himself about his options and the costs. And so he was blindsided by the six-digit bill from an apparently undisclosed doctor.
[Just an aside here. $117,000 for three hours of work makes no sense in any context. It makes far less in this context, in which the “primary surgeon” accepted a negotiated fee of $6200.]
The Times also reports on Patricia Kaufman, who received bills totalling $250,000 from two plastic surgeons who sewed up an incision. She had had previous surgeries in which residents sewed up the incisions at a much lower cost. She and her husband claim that they had no idea who these doctors were until the bills started showing up.
According to the Times, insurance companies often pay the bills rather than fight, encouraging the practice. Some states, including New York, are now seeking to regulate such “drive by” surgeries. It is not clear why the insurance companies would pay for services that had not been disclosed in advance. Perhaps this is grist to the anti-disclosurite mill after all, if the out-of-network surgeons were in fact disclosed somehow in the stack of informed consent papers.