Surprise bills, unexplained charges, and a lack of price transparency adds stress to patients’ recovery and makes some leery of seeking further care.
Robin Wayman had never heard of glossopharyngeal neuralgia before being diagnosed with the condition in 2025.
The rare illness causes excruciating pain in the ears, jaw, tongue, and tonsils.
Wayman, 64, found a neurosurgeon in Atlanta who could treat the problem. She traveled from her home in Seymour, Tennessee, for pre-surgery tests and an appointment with the hospital’s business office.
A representative presented Wayman with a form stating the amount to be paid by her insurer, about $16,000, and the amount she would owe, about $4,000. She signed the statement and made an initial payment of more than $1,000.
A few weeks later, Wayman underwent a successful procedure. While recovering at home, she continued making payments to the hospital.
Months went by.
Then Wayman received another bill—for $80,000.
Thinking it was a mistake, she called the hospital. The billing representative said the charge was accurate.
“Why didn’t I know this up front?” she said. “I would have searched for care somewhere else.”
The agent’s reply dumbfounded Wayman. “He said, ‘I’m sure you would have, ma‘am, but you owe it.’”
“I was sick,” she said. “I could not sleep. I didn’t know what I was going to do.”
The overwhelming majority of Americans have health insurance. Yet many face mystifyingly high medical charges, often revealed only after receiving treatment.
For them, the cost of health care is more than the tens of thousands spent on insurance premiums and medical bills.
It includes countless hours seeking answers from providers and insurers who, they say, sometimes seem intent on concealing the cost rather than revealing it.
For many patients, billing departments add another layer of stress to medical treatment. Some report worrying less about the prospect of surgery than about how to pay for it or whether to have it at all.
Some patients feel frustrated, others angry or victimized. Many find themselves asking some version of a familiar question: Why won’t they just tell me how much this is going to cost?
‘Nobody Explains It’
Mark Thompson, 55, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, went to a hospital outpatient department for routine hernia surgery in 2024.
Medicare allows about $2,900 for a straightforward hernia repair if performed at an ambulatory surgery center, or around $5,700 at a hospital outpatient department.
This hospital charged Thompson $93,826.
“I don’t know where all the money goes,” Thompson told The Epoch Times. “Nobody understands it, nobody explains it, and the people they have answering the phones aren’t much help.”
Dr. Marty Makary, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, seems to agree.
“Hospital charges are notoriously inflated—and hard to pin to any actual cost,” Makary wrote in his 2019 book “The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care—and How to Fix It.”
Makary said hospital CEOs regularly told him they didn’t expect anyone to pay the excessive prices. They were merely a starting point for negotiations with insurance companies.
But people do pay them.
