The thing about HD plans is you have to keep track of and pay all the bills yourself. As you get older it's a bit more difficult,and hospital billing is a nightmare. 3 years ago they put me into collection for $30,for a bill they never sent.
You're right. Hospital billing is a nightmare. They should be compelled by law to at least provide a complete detailed machine readable (not just machine printable) bill. If it were machine readable, it could be loaded into an app and compared to Medicare to validate that they're not billing you for something they didn't properly file. More on that later.
I'm new to Medicare this year and have AARP/UHC Plan-N (so have a $20 max doctor copay). I didn't "have to" do it, but I analyzed every one of 178 charge codes I've incurred this year.
What I discovered is that if you do what you're "supposed to do", it mostly works.
And what you're supposed to do is ignore the bill from providers until after you see it *correctly submitted* to Medicare, and passed to Medicare Supplemental. Usually they submit correctly to Medicare, and anything owed is passed to your Medicare Supplemental company automatically. You're responsible for what medigap doesn't pay, so after you get the medigap eob, you look for the provider bill to pay.
At the beginning of the year, anything that gets passed to your Medicare Supplemental company, you pay up until $240 (your deductible). This is true of G, N, etc. After that, in my case, I still have to pay up to $20 for office visits, because I have N.
Because I'm still a programmer (even though I've been retired a decade), I wrote a thing that matches the download from Medicare.gov with the download from uhc.com. It loads the payments I've made to providers too, so I can detect that the bill/claim are complete. I only review claims that aren't complete.
One thing to watch for is the provider not sending something through to Medicare. In my case, there was a claim that had maybe 10 codes, and only 8 were submitted to Medicare. That was NOT so easy to figure out! The provider's bill wasn't downloadable, so when they started making noises about me having to pay, I had to go line-by-line on their paper bill, comparing to the Medicare codes. Then write the facility and tell them to submit ALL the codes to Medicare, not just a subset. I probably could have skipped the analysis, but the problem was that this was the beginning of the year, so I wasn't sure if it was part of the deductible. This problem is going to be the same for everyone on traditional Medicare (G, N).
The other thing I ran into is Medicare rejecting something that should be paid. I'm still working through one of those. This example is a lab test that some bureaucrat decided wasn't a valid test to do in some cases, so it's rejected in all cases. The first appeal didn't work, and I'm on to the second level. It's not a lot of money, but I figure they give me the option to appeal, I'll appeal.
Hopefully my cognitive skills will remain high enough, long enough for me to get these algorithms in a mobile app...right now it's only on Windows desktop.