This month’s Philadelphia Magazine ranks the city’s top physicians — a fad nearly all major city magazines have adopted because it attracts great advertising dollars.
But tucked amid the pages of smiling surgeons and OB-GYNs is a gem of a story by the magazine’s executive editor, Tom McGrath, in which he takes readers through the maze he encountered while trying to decipher the hospital and insurance bills following his daughter’s appendectomy.
After his five-year-old daughter had her appendix out at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), McGrath set out to learn why it was so impossible for him to understand how much his daughter’s surgery and hospital stay cost, how much the insurance company was paying, and how much he owed.
"I discovered two things: first, that much of the cost of our health care is determined behind smoked glass, where patients are never invited to look," McGrath wrote. "And second, that in trying to make sense of a single simple case where everything went right, you can learn a lot about what’s wrong with health care in America."
