The hospital gave my health insurance company a big discount. But they weren’t going to negotiate with me.
January 29, 2025
…The hospital I visited agreed to accept just over $2,500 from my insurance company — on an initial bill of $4,500 — but, to my surprise, it wanted another $701 from me. This size of charge isn’t unusual: The national average out-of-pocket cost that insured patients paid for an ER visit was $646, according to a 2022 report from Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker.
…A Kaiser Health News analysis in 2019 found 45 percent of nonprofit hospitals were routinely sending bills to people who actually qualified for the hospitals’ own free or discounted care programs.