About half of surveyed report surprise medical bills

NPR reported on a survey showing that most respondents have been surprised by a medical bill that they expected would be paid by insurance. The survey had only 1,002 respondents, but if representative, that would represent a very large number of Americans who have been surprised by medical bills.

Surprise medical bills could happen because a doctor who was thought to be in-network might not have actually been, or an out-of-network provider was involved, or insurance not covering a type of treatment that it was thought to cover, or presumably a host of other reasons. Needless to say, such surprise medical bills make consumer transparency significantly more difficult. For elective or non-urgent procedures, it would be nice if patients could easily call up the provider office and get an accurate quote for how much the services would cost before committing to the procedure. Better yet, it would be even nicer if providers published their prices in machine-readable format (or via a centralized repository) so that consumers could easily compare prices.