so, elizabeth, so us what exactly you re talking about. all right, kyra, i have the forceps right here. take a look at this. this is a piece of it s mostly plastic. it s plastic with a little bit of metal here at the end and you squeeze it to operate the forceps and it looks and feels very much like a ballpoint pen. it is not gold plated. this is what we re talking about. again, $863 at the hospital $192 if you go to a medical supply company and get it and that s all these hospitals are doing they re going to supply dumps and getting them and marking them up in this case about 400%. how can we research whether or not we re getting overcharged? well, what you want to do is when you get your hospital bill take a look at it and there are a couple of hot zones, if you will. one of them is many times people get charged more than once for the same thing. so you want to start looking for repetition. the other thing you want to do is investigate whether you get a medical billing advoca
the next patient. elizabeth joins us now. first of all, elizabeth, i thought the steak analogy was interesting. what kind of forceps? these are the time of forceps used. these are for the eye. you can see they re plastic, they feel like a ball point pen, basically, the doctor squeezes them to make the forceps work. nothing electronic, totally mechanical, it s not goldplated. nothing here sans $863. can somebody go online and buy the supplies they need for the procedures and take them in. she proposed that. if you want to mark up your supplies four percent, allow me to buy and them bring them to the hospital. we brought ourses, in a sterile case here. you could conceivably bring it in in your sterile case. was betalked to the hospital association. here s the case they came that. we talk to the hospital association, no way, we re not
you recently had an experience when you were in the hospital that really blew your mind. well, when i got out of the hospital and got the bill. yeah, i definitely had an alarming experience. i received my bill. and i noticed some items that were totally inflated. for acce forceps, disposable. what went through your mind. i was outraged. i said, listen, i m a physician, this is an instrument that you re going to throw away. and i encountered a very arrogant young man from the billing department who basically said, when you sign consent for the procedure, you allowed us to charge you anything we wanted to. and so you then went on the internet to see what it would cost to get a pair of forceps from a medical supply company. yes, i did. show me what you found. a forcep similar to the one i
had, $1923. you paid $863 but you can buy it from a medical supply company for $192. yes, yes. that s very troubling. well, what i m going to do is i m going to go to the american hospital association and ask them, please explain this mark of up to me. i thoroughly agree with that. so the mark-up on these forceps was more than four times what it would cost to get it from a medical supply company. why, four times? because people want that, people want to know why. i think everybody understands the notion that when you buy something, let s say like a steak and you want to have a really nice steak dinner at home. it s a lot less expensive to prepare it and enjoy it at home than it is out in the rest rant. if they want to charge you $863 for a disposable piece of equipment, they can do it. the hospital has to be able to bring in more money than it spends or it won t be there for
everything like that? reporter: they are separated. what they say, is if we want to do a four or five times markup, we can do it. we markup these supplies to pay for our nurses and to pay for our electricity and all of that. and dr. galloway s argument was i have to pay 20% of my bill. let me bring in my own supplies. why can t i do that? you want to mark it up five times, that s fine, i want to bring in my own supplies. they say that s an issue of quality control. if you were to do that, how could you maintain quality control? i would assume a patient looking for the cheapest price and made for something substandard. reporter: her argument was, i can go to the exact same medical supply company that you went to. i hospital goes to a medical supply company can buy forceps and marks it up and i can bring