Urgent care ripoffs

Danielle Ofri, a primary care doctor, writes that she took her daughter to an urgent care center for a quick x-ray (two were taken). Two weeks later she received a bill for $1,168. Normally, she says, the cost should be around $100 for each x-ray. When examining the bill more closely she discovered that the radiology portion came from a hospital, not the urgent care center. She was told that, because the center was hospital-affiliated, it’s allowed to charge hospital prices.

She says she “…stumbled into a lucrative corner of the health care market called hospital outpatient departments, or HOPDs.” Because they’re considered part of a hospital, the urgent care centers can charge hospital-level prices for outpatient procedures, even though the patients aren’t as sick as inpatients. “I’m a doctor who works in a hospital every day, and I was fooled,” she says.

One study of pricing showed that HOPDs charged an average of $1,383 for a colonoscopy, compared with $625 average at non-HOPD settings. A knee M.R.I averaged $900, compared to $600. Echocardiograms command up to three times as much; prostate biopsies cost over six times as much. You get the idea.

In response to this article, which appeared in The New York Times (digital edition), more than 2000 people wrote comments. One woman said she’d taken her daughter, who was having abdominal pain, to an urgent care center. Before the clinic sent them to the hospital, she was given a urinalysis, a blood test, a dose of  acetaminophen, and an anti-nausea drug--treatments that lasted about 30 minutes. The bill was more than $13,000. Because of her insurance, she had to pay “only” a tenth of that.  

Another commenter said she’d driven out of her way to an urgent care place to avoid the emergency room. This was for a tick bite. She writes, “A nurse looked at the red ring, said ‘yep that’s a tick bite,’ prescribed me antibiotics, and I ended up $600 poorer because this center was ‘affiliated’ with a hospital.” 

As it turns out, before reading the article I had also gone to a hospital-affiliated urgent care clinic. I had bits of a tick embedded in the underside of my upper arm that my husband was unable to extract. My arm was sore and swollen and I wanted the thing out. I haven’t gotten the bill yet, but now I’m worried.

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