 Hi, y'all know who I am. Anyway, I'm going to be doing two things once again today, but I'm going to start off talking about healthcare. You know, a lot of people think that they're being taken advantage of by hospitals and physicians and clinics when they look at the prices that, you know, everything costs. And I'm not going to lie to you and say that healthcare isn't costly. What I am going to do, though, is I'm going to dispel three myths about hospital charges. And I'm talking hospital today. You know, I tell people all the time that I'm a healthcare finance consultant and they ask me what that means. In essence, my basic purpose is going in the hospitals and helping them to increase their revenue or help them to increase their cash. Now, you might think, well, hospitals are doing well with revenue. You want to know the truth? They're not. And you might think, well, goodness, they should have all the money in the world. Well, they don't. This is part of the three things I'm going to dispel today. So the first one is that hospitals charge for a lot of things that were never used. And I hear this one all the time where people look at their bills and they call up and they say, hey, what is all these things on the bill? I didn't get any of this stuff. And a lot of times, people don't know what they get. You know, if you cut yourself and you're in an emergency room, you don't ask the doctor, hey, what is that you're putting on me? Hey, what is that you're putting on me? And most of the time, even if you ask, you're not going to remember it anyway. If they give you something to take for the pain, you probably have no clue what that is. So, you know, this happens all the time. Here's the thing, anything that you are given, it has to go into the medical record. So there's a record of it. So and it's not just the doctor, it's the nurse, you know, doctors communicate to nurses. So most of the time it's a nurse that's giving you something to take or using something on you. That happens all the time, but it has to be in a medical record. So you may think, well, no, I never got that. Most of the time you do. Now, every once in a while, it's true. Something shows up that wasn't yours because hospitals see thousands of people a day. So every once in a while, that happens. But in general, that doesn't happen. And if you ever think it does, you need to call the hospital, ask someone to go through the medical record to see if something was on there. But most of the time, I will tell you probably 99% of the time, that's yours, more than 99% of the time. The second myth is that hospitals mark everything up to make a lot of money. That's not true. Hospitals do mark up to make some money, but not a lot. And here's something that you probably don't know. It works different in healthcare than it does in any other industry in the world. Because in healthcare, you basically have to treat someone and send out a bill. And everyone gets charged the same. If you've ever heard someone say, everyone doesn't get charged the same, they're lying. Or they don't know what they're talking about. Everybody gets charged the same. What happens, however, is that you have insurance. Then insurance is gonna take care of a part of your bill. And then you might owe something after that. You're either gonna owe a copay or you're gonna owe a deductible. Or maybe they pay 80% and you owe the rest of it. But everyone gets charged the exact same. So here's the deal. Hospitals make deals, and that's not quite accurate. Hospitals have their contract with Medicare. Every, you have public and private hospitals. And a public hospital basically is a non-profit. And every public hospital in the United States has to accept Medicare and Medicaid. I mean, that's just how that is. And if they don't, then it's either a private hospital or it's a hospital that's had it stripped. In which case they're pretty much on the outs, they ain't going anywhere. That's just how it is. So anyway, Medicare makes a determination of how much you're actually getting paid. And Medicare will tell patients, which is y'all, that you're gonna build 20% and we're gonna pay 80%. But Medicare never pays 80%. Medicare pays between 35% and 55% most of the time. That's the reality. So a hospital can bill something for $100 or they can bill you for $1,000, but you have Medicare, you're going to get paid basically in Medicare fee schedule. They don't call it that anymore. But that's in essence what it is. The same thing happens if you have Blue Cross. Same thing happens if you have Medicaid. The same thing happens if you have insurance. We'll just use United Healthcare because they're pretty much everywhere in the country, but in some places they're more dominant than others. So if United Healthcare is an insurance dominant in your area, then you're going to get that same kind of deal. However, if it's in an area where it's not dominant, then all that's gonna happen is that the hospital's gonna take whatever payment come from an insurance company and they're gonna bill the patient the rest. Which is why a lot of times if you have insurance, you'll hear about participating providers. In essence, that's insurance companies who go and set contracts with hospitals. And a lot of times those are based off of percentages. So if an insurance company gets a deal with a certain hospital and they say yes, we will pay you 60% of all of your charges, that is then when a hospital might raise their rates to try to maximize some of the services that they do. But they're not getting it from Medicare, they're not getting it from Medicaid, and they're probably not getting it from Blue Cross. That's just the reality. So let's throw that one out. They're not making a lot of money. And if you're self-paid by the way, or you owe a balance afterwards, you can always contact the hospital and try to get what's known as charity care. Which basically says one of two things, either they look at your income and see if maybe you qualify for Medicaid, or they look at your income and see if you qualify for discounts off of your balance. So there you go. The final thing is that hospitals make a lot of profit off their charging practices. That's not true either. Here's a reality, you probably don't know this, but this is a reality. A few years ago, this one medical magazine came out and said that around 79% of all public hospitals lost money. In essence, they weren't profitable. They were under that zero balance budget. And most hospitals go in looking for zero balanced budgets. If a hospital has a profit of 2% or 3%, you know what? That's considered a very successful hospital. Compare that to a business like a bank. Let's say Chase Bank is the only one I can think of right now. If Chase doesn't have a profit of 15% to 20% every year, they're considered a failure. Because they bank on this idea that we're going to have this profit. But hospitals in general, and I'm saying public hospitals, you don't get that. A lot of times you're going in with what you call a zero balanced budget. Zero balanced budget basically says, look, we hope to make this much actual money. This is how much we're budgeting for revenue. This is how much money we're hoping to get. We know that we have to replace some of our equipment. So all the departments will put that in their budgets to replace certain equipment because you have to. That's just medical. You don't get to string things along and say, well, maybe we can do with this another year. It just doesn't work that way in hospitals. Any profit that you make is supposed to go back into the hospital. So this is how this works. There's no shareholders for public hospitals. Private hospitals might be a different thing entirely. Private hospital does not necessarily have to accept either Medicare or Medicaid. Most of them do, but they don't have to. They have a lot more leeway on what they charge. Now they still have to hit certain things. For instance, there are these valuation kind of companies that come in and they have to find out, you know, they go through and they evaluate, make sure that you're following OSHA rules and you're following federal rules and you keep in the place clean and you're not having all kinds of infections or things going around. They still have to follow all of that, but their profit, which means they pay taxes, which means they have shareholders and whatever. You have a lot of those in the south. If you hear of a company that owns something like 75 to 100 hospitals, that's a for-profit hospital. So it's a little different. So there's three things that you probably didn't know about health care that you probably thought, hey, you know, hospitals are just evil, whatever. They're not. Even the private hospitals aren't evil. You know, they're just a business. And, you know, one of the things I tell folks all the time is if there's questions that you like answered, you know, leave them here. Most of the time I handle these questions on my other channel, which I'll put the link down below. I think I already have it down below, you know, TT Mitchell Consulting link. And I usually handle all my health care stuff as well as leadership and diversity and whatever over there. Sometimes I bring it over here, like this one here, because this is talking to y'all, which is, you know, patients. If you're already in health care and you didn't know this stuff, shame on you. Although, truthfully, a lot of health care people don't know this. Anyway, today I'm at Walmart getting some mincelle and I said, let's go see if there's a new Oreo flavor. And I didn't think there would be. Are you kidding? Peanut Butter Cup, Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Oreos. So I decided I would try this. I gotta tell you the truth. After that last batch that I had last week, I'm not expecting anything big here. So let's do the smell test first. Okay, that smells pretty good. It's a regular chocolate cookie. And inside you see that it's got both the peanut butter and the chocolate. And I'm gonna do half of this. Okay, that's not bad. You know what, okay. This is better than I was expecting. This is way better than I was expecting. So I don't know where these Oreo people are gonna stop. But now though, this is wonderful stuff. So I just, for the first time I just opened it. There it is. Let's hope I don't eat too many of these because I found out my wife is watching these videos so she's checking me out with these cookies. But you know what, I'm sampling and we're trying it out. So and Oreos isn't paying me for any of this. You know, I sample stuff because I'm in the mood. But you know, that's why I haven't done the red velvet because I've never had a red velvet anything. So I don't have anything to compare it to and I'm just not in the mood. So there you go. Anyway, y'all know who I am. Let me know your thoughts. You take care. Have a wonderful week.