Denver TV Reporters Show Our Healthcare System Is Messed Up

DENVER, CO – By Corey Hutchins for The Colorado Independent. The spotlight is shining on a trio of journalists for KUSA 9News, the Denver NBC affiliate, for the way they’ve been covering medical bills and helping save local patients money in the process. Poynter recently highlighted the special reports and investigations 9News calls Show Us Your Bills in which Colorado patients share their medical records and “prove that hospitals, clinics, doctors and other caregivers game the system to charge patients for care that was never provided.” The team includes reporter Chris Vanderveen, producer Katie Wilcox and photojournalist Anna Hewson. From Poynter:

The Show Us Your Bills investigations have helped viewers erase nearly $300,000 in medical overcharges and billing errors. Every time 9News airs a story, another dozen viewers send them detailed highly personal medical bills looking for help. The series caught fire when 9News reported the story of a man who went to the emergency room to have a splinter removed from his thumb. “He got a $2,100 bill,” Vanderveen said. “That seemed stupid.” “We didn’t have any intention of following medical billing stories for years, but at the end of that first story we put up an email, showusyourbills@9news.com, and it became a treasure trove of stories. People were willing to send us their medical bills,” he said. “I knew they were mad but I didn’t know they were that mad.” “We are not surprised by anything anymore,” Wilcox told Poynter. “There is no shocking amount of money that they charge that surprises us.”

Reporting on complex medical issues can be tough, so the journalists break them down into “small, digestible, narrowly focused stories” and mix in “touches of satire and mockery,” the story explains.

Here’s something else that jumped out at me in the piece, which came after a line noting how the journalists were hounding local hospital CEOs who wouldn’t comment:

Keep in mind that these hospitals are also big advertisers. “They spend a ton of money on marketing,” Vanderveen said. “They are not used to being pushed back on. They are used to TV stations doing countless ‘medical miracle stories’ and those are good stories but the PR departments are not used to anybody questioning them on the pricing structure.” 9News took the reporting, which sometimes looked more like teaching, beyond the evening newscasts. Vanderveen and Wilcox produced in-depth Facebook conversations where for a half-hour they drilled down on hard-to-understand topics like “balance billing” and explained how to fight unjust charges.

“The social media conversations not only answered viewer questions,” Poynter wrote, “but they also provided some insight into the depth of knowledge that these journalists have developed after two years of studying hospital billings.”

READ MORE in The Colorado Independent.

Photo by Darron Birgenheier for Creative Commons on Flickr