Hospitals should be prohibited from tacking extra bills onto patients paying for a large procedure out of pocket if they didn't disclose that bill as a possibility up front.
Period.
Anything not disclosed up front shouldn't be billable.
We THOUGHT @CTMC_SanMarcos disclosed all possible fees for my wife's sleeve gastrectomy up front. We paid all those. And we now have an extra $10,600 in medical debt from doctors and middlemen they NEVER told us about.
I mean, cars are expensive, but even the sleaziest buy-here-pay-here dealership wouldn't wait until AFTER you've signed the contract to tell you what your down payment will be.
But we have no analogous consumer protections for people who pay out of pocket for health care. And that's a big problem.
And that makes it incredibly easy to rip people off in ways that in any other industry would put you in jail.
But we have to solve this problem of hospital billing before anything else.