I am NEVER going to the hospital again.

[Jackalope]

If only it were this simple.

If I oversimplified, it was done through ignorance - I’m not really familiar with private health insurance.

Say I buy a policy that will cover 80% of the cost of a broken bone - the doctor, the nurse, the meds, taking up space in hospital, any physical therapy I may need...all of it. Then I break my leg. If the bill for everything come to...I dunno...$20 000, are you saying my policy won’t pay $16 000?

Boru

It depends.

We got stuck paying nearly $5000 in charges after paying our maximum annual out-of-pocket expenses because while the clinic we used was in network, the individual provider the billing was under was not. Yes, we asked whether they were in network prior to receiving service, and the provider had zero fucks to give and would not budge when we learned three months into treatment that we were on the hook for the full amount. They literally waited three months to submit the claims to insurance all at once.

We tried in vain multiple times to negotiate a reduction over the course of a year but they had zero interest in doing so. The charges were a substantial multiple of what the negotiated rate would have been if they had been in network.