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Comment by donretag | Hacker News Reader

"Calver asked whether his health insurance would cover all of this... The hospital told him not to worry and that they would accept his insurance."

From my experience, it is completely legal for any medical practitioner to say they accept an insurance even though they really do not.

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From my experience, no human at the hospital has any idea whether they will accept your insurance or not. The doctors certainly don't. They just report things into the bill-processing system which occasionally delivers patients a crazy $100,000 bill.

They have no idea if the insurance company will pay. I know this from personal experience where the hospital explicitly called insurance co to ask if a procedure would be covered, received confirmation that it would be, AND the hospital recorded the call. But coverage was subsequently denied.

Yep, this happened to my wife - she needed a fairly intensive and costly surgery and was told she was in-network and covered. It turned out the person on the phone was wrong and she ended up having to cash out her entire 401k to pay the 20k+ bill. We learned a lesson about the US healthcare system with that one...

"we accept it" is nowhere near the same thing as "the insurance company will pay for it". Of course they'll "accept" it, it just may not make a difference as to what you owe. they'll put it in their system.

the words used here have vastly different meanings to each party.

"accept an insurance" doesn't mean what you think it means.

It just means they will exchange paperwork with said insurance company. Whether or not your policy/company covers treatment is a completely different issue.

That's just nuts. As patient you go in blind and can just hope for the best.

Mere acceptance of insurance doesn't mean there won't be an exorbitant copay, anyway.

Yeah, but if they say that, then they should be responsible if they are wrong.

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