Senator Ranzenhofer's response to me

This is the letter I got back from Senator Ranzenhofer of NY.

I've talked about youcanplanforthis.org before. It's a very good tool for getting an estimate of what you will pay for a given procedure. It's difficult to use, however, with myriad billing codes to choose from. Their "episodes of care" tool is useful, giving you decent estimates of what something like "vaginal delivery" or "diabetes" will cost for the entire course of your medical care. Vaginal delivery, in my zip code, comes up at $11,037 out of network/uninsured and $5,833 in network/insured. How can anyone afford to have a baby?

I followed the link he sent for the NY state Surprise Bill Law and I got, unsurprisingly, a 404 error on the NY state website. Some googling later and I was able to find a summary of the law at https://nyshealthfoundation.org/event-recap/nyshealth-hosts-new-yorks-emergency-medical-services-and-surprise-bills-law/?gclid=Cj0KCQiAnY_jBRDdARIsAIEqpJ3AeCfcLWq2HaJTaJG5K7cqxopj6y3J0gDUsy0yjx3UrFNaFNqcr3QaAtZNEALw_wcB

The NYS Health Foundation website states that the law was passed in 2015 and allows people to not be overcharged (but to pay their regular in-network costs) for emergency services where the provider was out of network but they had no idea or were in too much of a medical emergency to ask about the provider's insurance network status.

Is this satisfactory? In short, no. It's very good news to see how much progress has been made, but ultimately patients need to be able to call their insurance companies and/or their doctor's office and ask "how much will this cost me" and get an actual dollars and cents answer. Nothing less can be considered true the true ethical mandate of providing services to people. I'll be calling Sen. Ranzenhofer to follow up with him.