No rationale for ER overcharges

Here's the scenario - you get hurt, go to the nearest Emergency Room for help and later are hit with a bill that makes your jaw drop.

For many patients, emergency room bills are a bitter pill to swallow - with hospitals overcharging on everything from aspirins to CT scans.

In a recent Time article, author Steven Brill writes that hospitals arbitrarily set prices based on a mysterious internal list known as the "chargemaster."

Not only do prices vary from hospital to hospital, but are often times as much as ten times the cost of the actual item. Brill said these are just some of the reasons why a few hours in an ER can result in a bill that could be larger than a patient's annual salary.

Brill, who spent seven months analyzing hundreds of hospital bills, concluded that there's just no process or rationale for current billing methods. He said that the healthcare market is not a market at all, but a crapshoot, where everyone takes a chance based on where they go and their circumstances. And in many cases, these overcharges are aimed at the uninsured.

Britta Erickson, a senior medical billing advocate, told Fox Business that it's always worth investigating whether a hospital properly billed a patient in the first place.

If a person does discover they were overcharged, or feels they paid way more than was justified, they may want to speak with an experienced attorney who can help them seek reimbursement of the excessive charges.