I had a hospital decide to restart the entire billing process on me after it was all paid for. Only time I've ever been glad for the insurance company (car, not health). I dropped it in their lap, and 3 mo later got an "our mistake" from the hospital, didn't have to lift a finger to fight it.

One of the more surprising things for me, watching major medical events from a distance and relatively close-up in my family, has been that hospital billing departments are at least as inconsiderate, incompetent, out-to-get-you, and generally shitty as insurance companies. And considering how much trouble I've seen/had with insurance companies that's saying something.

The number of times I've seen a bill that made no sense and been told, "oh, yeah, you're not misreading it, it's a bill, but you can ignore it because [reasons]"... WTF are they doing? Seriously, no-one else gets away with being so entirely sloppy.

Then there's the wonderful "we sent you one bill for a trivial amount which you probably lost in the pile of 50 other damn bills from 20 different providers, many of which were bills but didn't actually need to be paid (see above), plus twice that many not-bills-but-still-kinda-look-like-them statements of benefits and whatnot, didn't send a followup or call you or anything, but now you're in collections for $90 or whatever and your credit's dinged, sucks to be you".

Then if there's a dispute with insurance the hospital/providers will harass you until it's over. And sometimes just try to bill you even though they know it's being disputed. I guess they think you're not already spending enough time on the phone fixing their screw-ups.

I'm not necessarily in favor of fully nationalized healthcare exactly (some form of universal health care, yes) but it'd almost be worth having the government directly take it all over just to drink up those sweet, sweet hospital billing/admin and insurance company CEO tears. I truly wish everyone involved all the worst.

I had a similar experience. My wife was hospitalized for several months when her liver failed and she got a transplant. I have no complaints about any of the care she received; everyone did their jobs very well except for the billing department. Overall the total cost was around $1.5 million, and my insurance company did a fantastic job weeding out all of the duplicate and invalid claims. Their numbers for amounts claimed, allowed, paid to the providers, owed by us (deductible, co-ins), paid to us to cover out-of-pocket expenses that exceeded our annual max, etc always added up. But when the hospital tried to bill us, the numbers didn't work. Their "itemized" bill included claims that were rejected, claims that were paid by insurance, was missing claims that went through the insurance, and had some things that didn't match up to insurance claims at all. Every month they'd resend the bill, and it'd have different items on it with a different total amount. We had money from the insurance company to use to pay for what we owed the hospital, but we refused to pay it until the hospital could produce a bill that matched what the insurance company said we owed. They never did. (I'm not sure what happened; my wife and I were separated before all of this, and the bills always went to her. I think they just stopped sending the bill.)

I've had this happen many times as well - a non-itemized invoice for services rendered six or more months ago. It's not my problem that they can't get their billing service sorted. When I worked in the oil industry, vendors were expected to bill promptly (within 30-60 days) or not get paid.