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Re: What kind of insurance would Matt have?

[(Anonymous)]

This can vary a lot. If you want to know a hospital's billing practices then look up a specific hospital in NYC and search for their payment procedures. When I worked at the cancer hospital in my city they had financial coordinators who set up payment plans and worked with each patient to get maximum care for minimum cost.

Also Google search terms such as "insurance options for start up businesses."

I would also recommend looking into charity and disability funds which many hospitals have to help patients in financial distress. Matt would be a shoe-in. This goes double for religious based hospitals who make it their business to alleviate as much discomfort as possible off the patient. My older sister had a sudden baby delivery at the local Catholic hospital and only owed a few hundred dollars at the end of it because the hospital's charity fund covered her costs.

In Matt's case I would say he or Foggy (most likely Foggy) would meet with hospital financial coordinators who would communicate with the insurance company. Once the coordinator nailed down the insurance billing they would set up a payment plan if needed. It also depends on what the surgery is. An appendectomy is one thing but an organ transplant would be a whole other ballgame and without knowing what surgery Matt is having then I can't guesstimate what he would owe.

It's also important to know what insurance is and is not. Tieing the American medical industry to insurance was an attempt by LBJ or Nixon (I honestly can't remember which one) to lower medical costs. By pooling money together in one "place" as it were, they were trying to spread costs out over several people instead of making one person shoulder their imdividual costs by themselves. The result was mixed but it does help lower payments all across the board. A conscientious insurance company (yes, they do exist despite what the American media tells you) would communicate very quickly and swiftly with Matt, telling him his options and paying as much of his bill as they can and offering financial assistance and counseling if he requested it. (This was my personal experience with Anthem, who was very helpful to my mother when she had an emergency gall bladder removal. Financially, everything was resolved in the space of a week, which was when she left the hospital.)

Millions of people go through the system every day with straight forward surgeries and procedures, someone like Matt would be in and out of the hospital fairly quickly without much problem barring sudden onset of a bizarre disease or him suddenly being robbed of every cent he had.