Why your hospital bill is probably wrong

Hospital billing is complex, manual, and built around codes most patients never see. That combination produces mistakes — and the mistakes almost always favor the hospital.

Duplicate charges are the most common and easiest to spot: the same service billed more than once for a single encounter. Then there's upcoding, where a more expensive code is used than the care justifies, and unbundling, where services that should be billed together are split into separately priced lines.

On top of errors, there's markup. Hospital 'chargemaster' prices are often several times the Medicare allowed amount for the same service. That's not necessarily an error, but it's frequently negotiable — especially if you're uninsured or paying out of pocket.

The problem isn't that this information is secret. Medicare rates are public, and your itemized bill lists every code. The problem is that comparing them by hand is tedious. That's the gap BillGuard closes.