Addendum: Health at any price (but thankfully a low one)

As a follow-up to this post, I received another bill from the hospital itself for the stay, the surgery, etc. Before insurance it was $38420.74, and the bill was for $2348. So I went onto my insurance website to check out the explanation of benefits and saw that my insurance company claimed that I owed the hospital nothing, but didn't explain why. I called the insurance company to get them to generate an explanation of benefits, then called the hospital and had to manually email over the explanation of benefits containing the magic phrase:

"Service is incidental/Mutually exclusive to the primary procedure. Coding practice is inconsistent with current NCCI coding protocol. Patient may not be billed for the balance"

I sent that on to the hospital and they claimed that solved the issue, but will it? We'll see.

Anyone who says America has the best healthcare in the world is either ignorant, malicious, or rich. There is no other option.