Health Insurance

Last year health insurance premiums for business rose 20.4 percent. To hold the line, more and more companies, large and small, are auditing their health care bills. It can be done by outsiders or with selfauditing programs that offer incentives to employees who catch hospital billing errors. Savings can reach 24 percent of a typical hospital bill.

Government and private studies show that most hospital bills contain errors: charges for procedures never provided or medicine not dispensed. That's why most large corporations and insurance companies have big hospital bills audited. Three years ago Equifax, an Atlanta auditing firm, checked 40,000 suspicious-looking hospital bills that exceeded $10,000. It found that 97 percent of the bills, with an average total of $39,283, contained errors of $1,300 to $1,500, or about 3.5 percent. The hospitals were three times more likely to overcharge than undercharge.

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