And there's no way the insurance company paid $66.5K. The dollar amount on the bill is like the opening of the negotiation, it always starts way high and comes down from there. There's a rule that if an insurance company pays the bill you send them then you undercharged.
It's in the video, the insurance company paid about $8.5k and he paid another $2.5k. So you're absolutely right, that $69k bill turned into $11k pretty quickly.
Because, like every other rage-bait article about healthcare in America, it's a blatant lie.
The article states in addition to the x-ray that "the bill included an abdominal CT scan, medication, and two nights in a hospital room". American hospitals are full of multimillion dollar equipment and trained specialists staffed around the clock.
"The full price" is a fiction relevant only to negotiation of actual price between providers and government/institutional payers, no individual ever pays that. It's an imaginary number used to start price discovery so that the hospital, insurance companies and critically the government medicare/medicaid program can make some set of concessions and discounts so that in the end everyone comes to a "win-win" agreement.
My comment was not intended to indicate whether or not $2.5k is or is not outrageous.
The point of my comment is that $69k was apparently deemed to be sufficiently more outrageous and hence clickbait worthy such that it incentivized the writer to lie about the facts.
No. If I go to a hospital and get things done, and do not give them an insurance card, they can send me a bill for whatever numbers they want, and I am legally required to pay that!
The fact that you can often negotiate when you have a large debt that you are unlikely to pay does not change the fact that the debt is legitimate
Sure, but that is not relevant here because the person in the article did not receive a bill for $69k. My comments were strictly about the “journalist” painting the wrong picture about this specific scenario in order to incite emotion, presumably in order to get more people to click.
