Buzzword: Out-of-network
Life is hard enough without having to decipher everything. This week, make your list of doctors and check it twice or else you might end up "out-of-network."
Finance (iStockPhoto)
Insurers on the outs bring us this week's Marketplace Money buzzword: "Out-of-network."
Most folks with health coverage know the drill: visit a doctor who isn't contracted to your insurance company, you'll pay extra.
But New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo says for the past decade, some insurers charged too much for out-of-network visits.
How? By purposely underestimating doctors' "reasonable and customary charges" for those visits, leaving patients to pay more of the bill. Cuomo says it's a "industry-wide scheme to deceive and defraud customers."
His next step? To level reasonable and customary legal charges.
