If you only read the title, it sounds like the hospital scammed her. All the reports on this news sound this way.
The downvotes are crazy. I in no way indicated that the woman should pay the full amount because of the hospital’s mistake.
Also, if you have an open mind, you could see another perspective: her insurance is amazingly good, cutting $23k bill to $1.3k.
Well, personally: if I'm told that something will cost me $1300, and then there's a mistake, and they'll actually consult a big pile of papers that I'm not allowed to see to decide what to charge me... that sounds like a scam.
With an accurate estimate and correct information about the hospital not being in network, she would have chosen a different provider for her surgery.
> Also, if you have an open mind, you could see another perspective: her insurance is amazingly good, cutting $23k bill to $1.3k.
? Hospital estimated $1300 after her insurance, and provided no other info. Then she was billed $229,000. No one cut her bill to $1.3k, other than the legal system requiring the hospital to honor its original estimate after litigation.
In reality, consumers in the USA seem to have more protection buying a can of beans than they do in paying for cancer care - but this doesn't have to be the case!
> If you read the article, the hospital made a mistake, didn’t know she’s an out-of-network patient, so got the insurance wrong.
Surely you understand putting this with nothing else next to it is making excuses for the hospital and implying the patient is in the wrong?
It sure sounds like you took the hospital's side in the dispute. You then didn't offer any clarifying details as to your stance-- instead going "huh-huh--- where did I say that?! where did I say that?!" This doesn't help communication, but it sure does help confrontation and wasting other people's effort in communicating with you.
> It's not like the hospital intentionally hide the price and then charged her with a high price
Actually, this is exactly the practice with chargemasters: no one is able to know the price because the hospital holds the pricing information confidential.