@tomas Oh god you have no idea. No-one can tell you what a damn thing will cost upfront; it's just "well, do it, and we'll see what it shakes out as!"
We called our insurance about what we'd owe for a birth. Found we'd max out individual deductible for mother and newborn child at $500 each. Hospital collected that. Then insurance tells us a month or so later that actually we only owed the $500 for mother, and hospital ended up refunding us $500.
Then the lab that did the blood work tries to balance bill us (bill us for the amount the insurance did not pay, in contravention of their agreement with the insurer as part of the network), claiming they were out of network, but they weren't. Insurance finally got them to shut up.
And then, 18 months later, we find out the anesthesiologist at this in-network hospital actually was out-of-network. Apparently this is common. And is known as "surprise billing". We ended up paying the sizable chunk of change that our insurance didn't cover rather than having them send it to collections, which would likely end up cheaper but more annoying and damaging to credit score.
It's a total cock-up of a health "care" system that makes me want to stay as far away from it as possible because nothing good can come of interacting with it, only heartache and awful surprises.
// @blumenkraft @keita @dgold