1. Those 25 states ban this practice, and yet this practice happens in them... As well as the 25 others.
2. Did you notice the anecdote in another part of this thread where an approved, in-network procedure at an in-network hospital had an out-of-network anesthesiologist, because every single practicing anesthesiologist in the region is out-of-network?
3. As a buyer of health insurance, how can I even know, ahead of time, that there's a problem, like what was listed in #2?
4. As a non-buyer of health insurance (Because my employer chose which one to buy), even if I knew about #2, I don't even have any choice in the matter!
It's ludicrous to expect people to do all the research they need to do, to avoid getting bitten, in an industry that is as hostile to transparency as the medical billing industry. Where do you even start? [1]
> Medical billing is nonsense though. Just because someone sends you a bill does not mean you owe it or will ever have to pay it.
Is this legal advice? Because as I understand it, there are plenty of places which will happily garnish your wages over medical debt, and there are plenty of hospitals who won't write off outrageous balance bills if they discover that you actually have savings in the bank. (Oh, and the ones that will forgive it... Are robbing the public, because they get to claim that write-off on their taxes. As a taxpayer, that's my favorite part of 'charitable debt forgiveness'.)
[1] And even if you could do that research, the problem of balance billing comes from your insurer, and the hospital not agreeing on which services should have been paid for, and sticking you with the problem. You cannot predict that, at all, because it is always an after-the-fact case-by-case scenario.