The staggering cost of surviving heart disease in the USA
Given the name, I&#x27;m assuming OP is the blogger. Please follow up on this, seeing as it was only posted a few days ago. You almost certainly don&#x27;t really owe that. This type of thing happened to me many times years back when I was going through repeated spine surgeries and years of rehab and therapy. It felt like a nightmare seeing some ridiculous huge number pop up that my insurance refused to pay, but there was never a time I actually had to pay that. Medical providers effectively just send arbitrarily large numbers to insurers knowing they&#x27;re never going to see much of it, but they also know they&#x27;re not getting it from the customers if insurance denies it, either. Maybe a hospital is different, but there is no benefit to them in forcing you to go through a bankruptcy and then not getting paid anyway. Sometimes, these charges will just go away on their own and there is nothing you need to do. Sometimes, you&#x27;ll have to go through a ton of hassle. But 1) they know damn well you can&#x27;t pay two and a half million dollars, and 2) that isn&#x27;t the actual cost to them anyway.<p>This last point is confusing as hell and was one of the all-time great WTF moments of my life when I finally asked the office manager at my spine surgeon what the deal was with these absurd prices they were charging the insurance company. At one point, some neurologist I&#x27;d never even met did a two-minute consult while I was under anesthesia via video and charged the insurance $14,000 for that, which they did not pay, but neither did I. Whoever that was got along fine losing two minutes of his life without being compensated for it. When the office manager explained to me how they do billing, he told me the providers and insurance have no upfront agreement regarding what the prices of each procedure are going to be. The provider just knows there is some limit to what the insurance will pay, but not what it is. So instead of even trying to set some sane price, they just bill an arbitrary very large number hoping it is higher than the limit and they&#x27;ll get whatever the limit actually is, and when they don&#x27;t, the times they are overcompensated will cover for the all the times they are undercompensated. It&#x27;s like metainsurance for the providers themselves, except they&#x27;re also providing the insurance to themselves as a sort of ad-hoc forced savings mechanism.<p>Billing is totally messed up and the US healthcare is maybe the worst example of a jacked up attempt at combining some semblance of a market with centralized regulation the world has ever seen. But you almost certainly will never have to pay this money. There was never a single year I actually ended up paying more than my out of pocket max. And all those credit dings for the $120 bill that was one of 60 and slipped through the cracks just because it&#x27;s impossible to track all the mail you&#x27;re getting feels like a bigger deal than it really is. Don&#x27;t fret over your FICO score. It&#x27;s not what it used to be. In my experience, only consumer lines of credit really care and anything that matters like a mortgage uses a much saner evaluation algorithm that isn&#x27;t going to penalize you for this.