Surprise hospital bills are common in TX, report finds

About half of charges billed by doctors at an emergency room of a hospital in a network of one of Texas' three largest insurers are billed as out-of-network services because the doctor is contracted, the report found. For the state's second-biggest insurance company, UnitedHealthcare, more than two-thirds of ER charges at in-network hospitals are billed as out-of-network, according to the report. And nearly half of the hospitals technically in that network actually have no in-network ER doctors. "Even if you are a very sophisticated customer and try to choose hospital A over hospital B based on network, you can't control who sees you," said Stacey Pogue, the report's author. "It's a total roll of the dice." [Subscription Required]