> which can be extremely complex. What gets me about the insurance billing is that besides being complex for me, it is also complex for the insurance company -

> which can be extremely complex. What gets me about the insurance billing is that besides being complex for me, it is also complex for the insurance company - people on the other side are just people, after all, not some infallible super-intelligent aliens. And the failures that come out of that are kind of hard to believe for people used to nationalized health care; my favorite example was a $15k bill I received months after a surgery that I called back to get more details, upon which the agent said something like "oh that's coded wrong" and after a few keyboard taps I owed $500. What if I had paid the original amount without asking? How many people do not ask? And the cynical question, how often do the "coding errors" happen the other way?