[karatestomp]

Nothing about hospital billing would fly anywhere else. Bills just showing up after the fact with little ability to verify their accuracy, constant errors one can catch anyway (so how many are missed?), bills showing up months later from a half-dozen different sources when you only had one apparent "vendor", and so on.

I bet we received between 100 and 200 pieces of mail for each of our kids' births, including maternal care before the births. Probably averaged 40-60 hours dealing with billing and billing problems with each one, maybe more. And ours were all totally normal and about as easy as it gets, and we had insurance. I think we ended up missing some tiny bill we could easily have paid in each one (oh, yeah, they also like to give you very little time to pay) and had them go to collections.

[beckler]

I found a bill with a mistake on it, as one of my kids was charged twice for a single procedure. I called to get it fixed, but instead of dealing with it they just immediately sent it to collections.

[karatestomp]

My experience has been that no one at the insurers nor at medical providers’ billing departments give a shit until state regulators and/or legislators’ offices get involved. Which means yet more time on the phone.

The amount of time lost dealing with this system of ours is incredible. All else being equal it would be a win just to eliminate that, and there’s no reason to suppose that is the only improvement we could achieve.