In a David Goldhill essay highlighted here last week, he closes a paragraph with the following:

“In case you wonder who a care provider’s real customer is, try reading one of these bills.”

Below is a single page from and eight page hospital bill from my first stay in the hospital. On two occasions, I’ve been “taught” how to read this bill and still find it unnecessarily confusing. Perhaps that’s more about me than the bill. Or perhaps it doesn’t have to be that way, perhaps reading the bill from your hospital visit should require learning some institutionally-devised format. My perspective is an admittedly biased one so I leave an open invitation to anyone involved in hospital billing, or who holds adequate knowledge on the subject to explain why this bill cannot look sort of like the bill received when purchasing any other earthly service.

Note to others, if you think you’re reading this correctly at first glance you probably aren’t, if you study it for a few minutes you are right, you could figure it out. But that’s precisely the point, why should any bill have to be looked over like a game of Sudoku?

hospital bill 3

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