Since 2018, “Bill of the Month” has investigated medical bills totaling almost $6.3 million — including nearly $2.8 million that patients were expected to pay out-of-pocket. Cited at statehouses, the U.S. Capitol, and the White House, the series has led to changes in health policy.
Bram Sable-Smith/KFF Health New Julia Robinson Lauren Justice Heidi de Marco Zack Wittman Nitashia Johnson Kevin Painchaud and Laura Buckman for KFF Health
Over 6 1/2 years ago, KFF Health News and NPR kicked off “Bill of the Month,” a crowdsourced investigation highlighting the impact of medical bills on patients.
The goal was to understand how the U.S. health care system generates outsize bills and to empower patients with strategies to avoid them. We asked readers and listeners to submit their bills — and they kept coming. “Bill of the Month” has received nearly 10,000 submissions, each a picture of a health system’s dysfunction and the financial burden it places on the patients.
Since 2018, we have analyzed bills totaling almost $6.3 million — including nearly $2.8 million that patients were expected to pay out-of-pocket.
Cited at statehouses and the U.S. Capitol, the series has led to changes in health policy. Two patients featured by “Bill of the Month” were invited to the White House in 2019 to discuss their surprise bills: Elizabeth Moreno’s $18,000 urine test and Drew Calver’s $109,000 heart attack. In 2020, Congress passed the federal No Surprises Act, shielding patients from most out-of-network bills in emergencies, among other protections.
Last year, the Biden administration announced plans to lower health costs that included targeting a loophole that allowed health providers to evade the surprise-billing law — a problem first identified by “Bill of the Month.”
Many patients submitted high prescription drug bills. In treatment for prostate cancer, Paul Hinds was billed nearly $74,000 for two shots of an old drug called Lupron, which can cost just a couple of hundred dollars overseas.
Now, the federal government has identified Lupron as one of the medicines that has seen its price rise faster than inflation — meaning its manufacturer owes rebates to Medicare under President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
The law also authorized the Biden administration to begin negotiating the price of specified drugs for Medicare patients, who now benefit from a cap on the price of insulin.
Despite having insurance, Bisi Bennett was charged $550,124 after her son was in the NICU for nearly two months.
Zack Wittman/KFF Health News
“Bill of the Month” has helped many patients and readers get their medical bills reduced or forgiven. Roughly 1 in 3 bills were resolved for the patient by the time their feature was published.
