Yeah, the No Surprises Act was monumental and basically the pinnacle of the Biden administration imho. Before, like you said, an anesthesiologist would just walk in to your room and look at your chart, and you couldn't say anything at all or speak up in time, and BOOM- balance-billed. Nowadays, you'll still get balance-billed, but after spending a dozen hours on the phone or so it gets dropped. Still crappy unpaid work but at least you're not on the hook anymore

It's no secret that you have to take up a full-time job as your own advocate to coordinate between the provider and your insurance company. You have to untangle coding mistakes and do a bunch of stuff that usually requires about 3-4 full days of full time phone work, following up with people, escalating, etc. It always follows the path of least resistance and when the customer doesn't speak up the system crushes them. There are a lot of weird loopholes that result in bills, but a couple dozen hours of phone and coordination work will result in those bills getting dropped, or paid for, due to the No Surprises Act (as long as you went to an in-network facility)

No Surprises Act :) they can't balance-bill you for anesthesiologists anymore

Wait so the average plan has like a $7,000 max yearly out-of-pocket or something. Max YOOPM is like $9k IIRC. If you have to go to the hospital and get a 100k bill, provided you chose to go to an in-network facility (or you were incapacitated), you just need to pay whatever balance was remaining on that ~$7,000 worst case scenario. Are these people illegally uninsured or something?

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