The other side of this is "Oh good, now I can get my health outcomes managed by the same people and with the same level of customer service/personal touch as my Department of Motor Vehicles and will have literally no alternative but to take it." Arguing the worst case of either system and representing it as the most common case is rarely productive.
My description's the typical case for the US system, in my experience, not a worst-case, and I've not seen evidence that my experience is unusual—quite the opposite. At least we haven't been bankrupted by it yet, so there's that, but only because our family's pretty healthy.
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."
