https://www.consumerfinance.gov/consumer-tools/debt-collecti...
Someone in a similar situation to yours might consider researching your state's statute of limitations on debt, and if your debts are expired based on that statute, file a complaint with the CFPB, FTC, and your state's attorney general to report a debt collector's FDCPA violations. Not legal advice.
I'll call the provider once and explain what's wrong with the bill. Either they fix it, or I ignore them completely after that. Their bills go straight to the trash unopened.
Frequently as soon as you explain they need to fix something they just completely drop the bill for the same reasons as in this article: It's simply not worth their trouble to bill accurately, and they don't have the ability to do so. (And I'm talking about the provider here, not a debt collector.)
I've never once had a provider actually fix the bill, the closest I've gotten (just once so far) is a "courtesy credit" to make the bill what I told them it should be, and I paid that one.
All the others didn't fix the bill, so I didn't pay them.
The whole system is a mess. I had a bill rejected by the insurance as a duplicate. No, but I could easily see why they thought it was--and they told me how it should be billed so it wouldn't be rejected. Call the lab, tell them what they did wrong in the billing. They resubmit unchanged. The insurance won't accept my statement that it's legit. Call the lab, simply offer to pay it at the negotiated rate (which is all I was after, the deductible wasn't met.) Round and round--finally the insurance rejects it as billed too late and the whole thing goes away.
Unless you intend it to be a manual process, which isn't practical since you'll need info from everyone that's going to be hard to collect, i.e. the same problem the biller has.
The way it used to work was the biller charged insurance, and insurance paid, and that was the end of it. No one ever double checked anything.
Obama (with Obamacare) changed that - now everyone has a high deductible, insurance pays part, but you pay part. And suddenly people are motivated to check the bills.
Realistically the biller just drops bills where the person has to pay, and they live off of what insurance pays automatically.
The "on paper" of what American health care is, vs the reality are very different. The reality is weirder, but better (by better I mean less expensive than it looks on paper).