My wife has sleep apnea, so during her normal annual checkup the doc wrote her a prescription for a CPAP. She goes to the local vendor, they tell her to pick o

My wife has sleep apnea, so during her normal annual checkup the doc wrote her a prescription for a CPAP. She goes to the local vendor, they tell her to pick out whichever machine she'd like. She would rent it for a few months to make sure she liked it. The insurance company would pick up the bill. Many months later we just got a bill for $500. She calls them. They tell her that this is the balance owed on the machine. Now they've already billed the insurance company four thousand dollars for the machine. The insurance company paid about a quarter of that. Then she the rents on top of that. And now they want the balance. The bill came completely out of the blue. They won't take it back. So she's thinking about selling it. Going online the machine is only worth 500 bucks brand new. They're basically selling the same machine three different times: once to the insurance company, once on a rent-to-own deal, and once as a bill coming from nowhere. I don't know in what universe this is not considered plain old fraud. The billing situation in healthcare in the U.S. has become so byzantine and complicated that's it has basically turned into a shell game of screw-the-consumer. I don't want to talk about why it happens. I don't want to talk about solutions. I will say that the politics of healthcare has led us here -- nothing else but that. And the more we argue the worst it will continue getting. I do want to note that it seems like every month or so there's some new horror story. It's so bad that the vast majority of the time nobody talks about it. It's an awful mess.