Stuff like this is why our healthcare is overpriced.

[Massacure]

7. That depends on how the contract is written

A lot of insurance plans prohibit providers and facilities from balancing billing their members if they want to be participate in the plan's network.

My brother was admitted to a hospital for three days a couple years back and it took the hospital nearly a day between the time test results showed his vitals were stable and the time they actually released him. United Health Care deemed the last day of admission not medically necessary and declined to pay for it, which resulted in the hospital sending my brother a rather hefty bill. When my brother appealed to United Health Care, UHC told him the hospital was contractually prohibited from doing that and that they would deal with it.

My brother is lucky his roommates brought him to an in-network facility; had the hospital been out-of-network he probably wouldn't have been able to have United Health Care go and lay the boom down on his behalf.