Steve Palma | Source | President at Sola Health

Sola Health has launched a portfolio of self-funded health plans that deliver premium medical and pharmacy coverage at a lower cost. With these modern plan designs, Sola is helping employers of all sizes break free from the skyrocketing premium and renewal costs commonly experienced with fully insured carriers.

Goodroot has announced the hiring of Steve Palma as president of medical cost solutions. In this new role, Palma will support Goodroot’s mission of making healthcare more affordable and accessible by leading its newly established medical cost solutions area. Finding synergies among existing Goodroot affiliates, as well as launching and fast-tracking new offerings, Palma will develop solutions for employer groups and health plans to enable employees to more easily navigate their medical benefits, ensure bill accuracy and avoid medical debt by accessing quality medical treatment at a fair price.

Steve Palma is the President of Medical Cost Solutions at Goodroot and we talk about what medical billing errors have to do with increasing healthcare costs. Steve also shines a light on hospital financial assistance programs and how they are not being used enough to help patients pay high medical bills. Steve provides some details, "Well, the billing errors include the cost of payers overpaying or underpaying claims, and the cost to the providers in billing correctly and then dealing with all the administrative headaches around audits by payers, and getting that claim ultimately right. These add a tremendous amount of administrative cost on both sides. It ends up getting passed to the consumer." "You'll hear some people on the health plan side say it's all abusive provider billing practices, whether it's fraud or potentially maximizing coding in a complex coding environment. On the provider side, often, they'll say it's...