Basically, 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 re

Basically, 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.