Thread by @fawfulfan

All surprise medical bills should be illegal.

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.

When you go to a hospital for, say, a major surgery, the hospital should tell you *every* doctor who might bill you, their likely price range to within a certain degree of accuracy, and what it costs to treat complications.

Anything not disclosed up front shouldn't be billable.

This might result in the procedure itself being slightly more expensive up front. But it would mean patients can actually account for all the costs ahead of time, budget for them, and factor them into their decision if the procedure is elective.

And yes. This is because I'm pissed about my own experience.

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, in what other industry except health care would it be okay to do this?

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.

The Affordable Care Act was designed to regulate and standardize how health insurance covers and bills you. And it did a great job of that.

But we have no analogous consumer protections for people who pay out of pocket for health care. And that's a big problem.

Health care is so expensive because no one understands what anything costs. Even most of the health care professionals in the hospital don't understand it!

And that makes it incredibly easy to rip people off in ways that in any other industry would put you in jail.

In one sense, this is why Medicare for All is such an appealing solution: it takes all of this complexity off the shoulders of regular working people and puts it on the government.

But we have to solve this problem of hospital billing before anything else.