All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

When CBS News caught up with Lisa Kelly, she was nearing the end of an almost 100-day treatment which included taking 21 pills a day, an intravenous drip in the afternoon, and multiple trips to the hospital every week. It was a life I couldn't imagine, and one that all sorts of cancer survivors could probably relate to. The reason we profiled her is because she is at the confluence of some significant shifts in American healthcare.

First, she is part of a population of 25 million who are underinsured. According to the Commonwealth Fund, that number is up a staggering 60 percent since 2003. These are people who have "health coverage" but still pay more than 10 percent for their income for medical expenses. It isn't just the poor we're talking about; the middle class is hit especially hard. For adults with incomes above 200 percent of the federal poverty level (about $40,000 per year for a family), the underinsured rates nearly tripled since 2003.

When Lisa was healthy and purchased the most affordable plan to her at the time, like most of us, she didn't think she was going to be diagnosed with cancer. She knew she had purchased a limited benefit liability plan and has always admitted that she had no false hopes that this would be "Cadillac coverage". However when she was told by M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston that her coverage was unacceptable even to get her an appointment, she was shocked.

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Read M.D. Anderson's response.

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Lisa Kelly had purchased a plan marketed by the AARP, an organization which has a tremendous amount of credibility with Senior Citizens, and a brand those consumers have come to trust. The plan was far below any expectation she had. When she had to cash in part of her husband's inheritance to get an appointment at M.D. Anderson, and was asked for even more money to be admitted, it got the attention of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. As soon as there was an investigation and a hearing on Capitol Hill, the AARP stopped marketing the plan.

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Read Grassley's letter to AARP.

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The AARP's response?

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CBS News reported this week that despite millions of dollars flowing out from Iraq's rich oil resources every day, some of the country's social services, including basic hospital care, are sorely neglected. You can read the story here. Larry Doyle, our Baghdad bureau chief, saw the effects of this firsthand, when his friend and neighbor needed care. What follows is his story, told by Doyle.

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It was about 120 degrees the day I met Alfred. One of those furnaces-like Baghdad days that come blazing in every June. Alfred had found about the only relief on our rock-covered dirty street. He looked pretty comfortable in a worn, formerly white plastic chair propped in a little shade supplied by a 12-foot-high concrete blast wall.

Damn, I whispered, I’m melting. Why isn’t that chair?

“Salaam alaikum,” I sweated out in fractured Arabic.

“Sit, my friend, please sit,” was the perfect English response. And that simple exchange started a great friendship.

Almost exactly a year later, Faried Yacob George lay in an emergency room in Baghdad Hospital, one of five in the Medical City complex.

Faried was my friend Alfred. I never wrapped my tongue around his real first name so we decided “Alfred” would do just fine. Actually Alfred was in the emergency room two days and nights and eventually was given a saline IV the second day because he was dehydrated. Sitting a long time in a sweltering room will do that to you. It will do that to a healthy 20-year-old. My friend was 76.

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Wyatt Andrews is a correspondent for CBS News based in Washington.

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Forget the actual cost of health care, for one moment, and focus on this question: why are hospital bills so buried in code, so averse to plain English? The simple answer is: hospital (and most doctors') bills are written in codes endorsed by the AMA (American Medical Association) and used by reimbursement specialists with the Federal Government and insurance companies. We the patients, simpletons that we are, aren't supposed to understand.

But it's deep within these overly complex codes that many experts believe mistakes get buried--and that most "mistakes" are usually overcharges.

One growth industry in America today is the rise of a specialty service whose practitioners are called "Billing Advocates." An advocate is trained to read a complex bill from the doctor or a hospital and find the errors. In our interview for tonight's CBS Evening News, Nora Johnson, a no-nonsense billing advocate from West Virginia says that of the thousands of medical bills she has reviewed for clients, maybe three have not had errors. To be clear, that's three clean bills out of several thousand. Nora showed me one bill with a $1,000 charge for giving a patient a toothbrush.

"Are these errors deliberate?" I ask. "I call it profitable error," she responds...

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