4 ms·
I'm on a PPO right now, new to me this year, and it's great. I have a chronic condition that requires surgery about three times a year, so I'm used to just maxi
by beat 7y ago
I'm on a PPO right now, new to me this year, and it's great. I have a chronic condition that requires surgery about three times a year, so I'm used to just maxing out my costs. There are two levels of the surgery, and the higher level is full general anesthesia, with all that entails.
In practice, it was less expensive out of pocket for the intensive surgery (a bit over $1000) than it was two months ago for the low-intensity local anesthesia surgery ($1300), even though the initial bill was over twice as high.
At any rate, because of my chronic condition, I'm very sensitive to costs. I'll take the good insurance, thank you!
- sjg007 7y agoI am curious, why does the PPO make a difference here? Is it vs the HSA or vs HMO or in network? Is your provider in network?
- beat 7y agoBasically, I have one provider, except for emergency care - a large local network. It's fine for me, because my family doctor and both the specialists I need regularly for chronic conditions are in that network. For my condition that requires regular surgeries (like 3x/year), there are two levels of surgery - one local anesthetic, one general anesthetic. The first time I got the general one done, the bill to my insurance was $35k. This time, with the new insurance, the bill was $19k. So I think the PPO relationship is making a huge difference in how the internal billing works. At a higher level, the full hospital general anesthetic surgery in January on new insurance cost me less out of pocket than the much less complex local anesthetic surgery cost me in December, on previous insurance.