The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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In advance, you just don't. I mean, you eventually will, when the bill comes, but before that, it looks like our civilization is not advanced enough to find an answer to this question. That's one of the infuriating things in in US medical system - everything is set up to make it nearly impossible to state the cost upfront, or at least everybody involved in the system has been telling me so for years. Of course, this has a great benefit (for the providers involved) of precluding any price comparisons.
Yes, sometimes several bills, because why make it easy for you, what you are going to do, not use medical services? And yes, those several bills may be from several billing systems, each set up differently, and not talking to each other. Some don't even have online payment options. A lot of medical billing is surprisingly low-tech still.
Weird thing they actually do - at least the system I'm with now, you can see the visit notes afterwards, and they actually record pretty much everything. Whether or not anybody reads it afterwards is an entirely different question.
Sorry about your elbow.
I suppose I should just say it. I know you implied it, but someone should just say it directly. This thing that everybody involved in the system has been telling us for years... that the system is not advanced enough to find an answer to this question... is a lie. The people involved have the numbers that are required. They can just give those numbers to patients. When this is pointed out, they will lie and misdirect and do everything they can to throw up fake and imagined roadblocks to this very simple reality, to the point of playing dumb/lying about whether they are even capable of identifying the names of the numbers in question. It is the great shame of the medical industry that they have harmed so many patients by their addiction to price opacity. I've pointed before at pieces like this where they talk of patients making choices to not get care because of price opacity or situations where because talking about prices is verboten, the doctor might prescribe an expensive drug that the patient won't buy, but could have prescribed a cheaper, almost as good, drug that the patient could actually afford and would buy. I don't know how one would even estimate the number of times that people simply suffer through problems rather than seek medical help because of price opacity. They feel like if they even consider seeking medical help, they will never have any further chance to consider the cost involved. The perception is that if they do it, they're basically spinning the roulette wheel and then will learn after the fact, after services have been rendered, whether they will owe $10 or $10k. It's unsurprising that many reasonable decisionmaking-under-uncertainty-and-budget-constraint algorithms just opt out of that game of roulette.
Yeah I know, I was being sarcastic of course. They can do it upfront. They just refuse to do it because it's more convenient for them. And more profitable.
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While this is annoying it's actually better than the alternatively, usually when you get separate bills it mean you are getting one from the physician, the health system, and the lab or something else similar to that.
Why not consolidate?
Well some places do and then you have a monopoly with resulting problems.
Separate bills means separate entities which slightly keeps what little of free market economics you can get in healthcare.
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