The entire medical billing industry's standard practice is to shotgun out first-draft bills that bear little resemblance to reality and hope people are dumb eno

The entire medical billing industry's standard practice is to shotgun out first-draft bills that bear little resemblance to reality and hope people are dumb enough to pay. I'm sure they save a bunch of money by not having to fix their buggy processes. Instead they get to outsource their work to patients who have to figure out the bills on their own initiative and come up with specific objections because their credit is on the line. I've had all of the following happen to me in the last few years: - I get a bill in the mail for an ER visit and it's ludicrously high. I call the hospital and ask if a human has seen it or if it was just auto-generated. They tiredly take down my name as if this is the tenth time today, and promise a human will look into it. A week later I get a revised bill for a fraction of the original amount. - I get a check for over $400 from the same hospital in the mail one day. A photocopied "to whom it may concern" note on a little slip of paper explains: "It has been determined that an overpayment is owed to you. Please see the enclosed check. Thank you." No other explanation or even a perfunctory "sorry we kept your money interest-free for a year." - I get a medication partially covered by insurance and partially covered by copay assistance from the drug company, so that I pay nothing. A couple of weeks after starting it, I get a bill in the mail from CVS for a couple of hundred dollars. Oops. It's a billing error and I actually owe nothing, but now it's my responsibility to sort everything out between the various parties. - I get a call out of the blue (flagged by Android as a suspected spam caller) from someone claiming to be a collections agency trying to collect a few hundred dollars for a blood test I don't even remember at first. They say they're the second collections agency who inherited this bill. I never got anything in the mail and this is the first I'm hearing of it, so I'm naturally suspicious, but they have all of my information and describe the blood test and it does sound familiar. I tell them to send me a bill - obviously I'm not going to give out my credit card number to a random caller. They call back the next week, again wanting me to settle the debt over the phone. I ask for a bill. They say they sent one. But I've still never gotten anything in the mail. Now I'm anxiously watching my credit report and hoping the reporting agencies will believe me when I tell them I was never billed. Everything about this is a gigantic clusterfuck. The last thing we need is even higher healthcare costs, but this industry's behavior is so completely and hopelessly broken that if someone puts a shareholder-crushing mountain of additional patient protection regulation on the ballot, I'll vote for it out of sheer spite. But seriously, we desperately need single-payer to cut through this rainforest of billing bureaucracy. This is less like a functioning society than like a Kafka novel come to life.