As long as we’re sharing anecdotes and interpreting them as typical case outcomes: We’ve had two births, an uncomplicated broken arm, a complicated broken arm, another moderately complex issue that was many visits over a length of time, and countless pediatrics and adult GP visits and a few ER visits over the last decade with BCBS.
I’d say that 95% of all visits go off with zero interactions beyond paying our part of the bill and waiting for paperwork to cycle around. The 5% cases are about half billing questions and half “just confirm that subscriber XYZ visited doctor D on date Q (so that we [as BCBS] know we’re not being scammed by the doc)”.
We are nowhere near “tens of hours...every time [we] use medical care”. I doubt we’re even 10 hours per year on billing issues.
We've ended up with many bills, multiple EOB documents, et c., trickling in over a span of many months, coming from a bunch of different sources, each time we've had someone in the actual hospital (not just a doctor's visit), including three births. We've managed to miss some trivial bill and end up with it in collections because there's just so much damn paperwork and usually a few of them are in some state of error or dispute for some time. Seems to be normal. You in Kaiser or something? I understand that's smoother than... basically everything else, since it's all run by one entity (ahem).
Nope. Blue Cross Blue Shield. We have a high-deductible plan (just so we can qualify to use an HSA as an additional retirement account). In theory, that means we should have more billing hassles than with a typical HMO or PPO. I feel like they mostly get it right; we do have to be patient to let the billing and insurance people have a few rounds of figuring crap out, but I'm not involved other than opening the mail until it settles down to "OK, now pay this amount."
I’d say that 95% of all visits go off with zero interactions beyond paying our part of the bill and waiting for paperwork to cycle around. The 5% cases are about half billing questions and half “just confirm that subscriber XYZ visited doctor D on date Q (so that we [as BCBS] know we’re not being scammed by the doc)”.
We are nowhere near “tens of hours...every time [we] use medical care”. I doubt we’re even 10 hours per year on billing issues.