The worst thing is this shows the awful racket between healthcare providers and insurance companies. “Provider billed” means “insurance paid.”
“Yeah we had to hit some arbitrary numbers to break through your insurance’s limit that both orgs will write off before we actually charged you with the real 2000 dollar bill”
If you want to see how arbitrary the charges are in the American medical system, just call them up once you get a bill. Not to complain, not to dispute, just say “can I get an itemized bill where you tell me exactly what you did and what each thing you did cost me?”. That, on its own, will cut your bill in half. For profit medicine has made it so no one has any idea what anything costs, so negotiations on price begin after you’ve accepted the service and they’ve completed it. Providers do secret deals with insurance companies so that what something costs depends on who’s paying for it, to an extent where sometimes it’s cheaper to just pay out of pocket because for some reason that will never make sense your insurance company agreed to (make you) pay extra for that procedure.
The worst thing is this shows the awful racket between healthcare providers and insurance companies. “Provider billed” means “insurance paid.”
“Yeah we had to hit some arbitrary numbers to break through your insurance’s limit that both orgs will write off before we actually charged you with the real 2000 dollar bill”
If you want to see how arbitrary the charges are in the American medical system, just call them up once you get a bill. Not to complain, not to dispute, just say “can I get an itemized bill where you tell me exactly what you did and what each thing you did cost me?”. That, on its own, will cut your bill in half. For profit medicine has made it so no one has any idea what anything costs, so negotiations on price begin after you’ve accepted the service and they’ve completed it. Providers do secret deals with insurance companies so that what something costs depends on who’s paying for it, to an extent where sometimes it’s cheaper to just pay out of pocket because for some reason that will never make sense your insurance company agreed to (make you) pay extra for that procedure.