Hospitals can pretty much go fuck themselves. Seton Southwest in Austin for damn sure can. Several years ago I took my daughter to the emergency room. Turned out she just had a particularly nasty stomach virus. We spent a few hours in an exam room, the doctor came in a couple times and spent a total of 10 minutes at most with her. Besides some ibuprofen she received a bag of fluids. The bill: $5200. And that was just from the hospital. The doctor sent a separate bill for nearly $400. At that time my wife was only employed part-time and we had shitty insurance for her and the girls (my insurance was around $150/mo for me but would have been > $900/mo to add dependents so we had an independent policy to cover wife/kids).
I had face to face meetings (eventually, after a lot of pushing) and essentially told them no, I will not accept your payment plan because there is not a chance in hell I am paying that kind of fee for the services we received. A f'ing IV was really all she got. I told them in what was really kind of an idle threat that we could negotiate or they can let it go to collections and good luck (I wasn't going to do that as I didn't want to damage my credit).
In the end I got them down to $1800 (plus whatever we owed the doctor), which was still pretty outrageous, IMO. They were prickly about it pretty much all the way through. The fee just to walk to the goddamn door to the emergency room there was around $2500. They gouge the living shit out of people and then wonder why so many people default on their payments. It is out of control and it is an increasingly growing problem.
