For those in the industry, it was a win-win situation: hospitals no longer had to buy malpractice or health insurance or figure out how to staff vacations. Doctors could charge what they felt they were worth. But for patients, this meant the proliferation of separate bills for these doctors’ services, from companies with mysterious return addresses in distant states. Then, around 2010, many of these doctors’ groups, who worked at in-network hospitals, simply stopped contracting with any insurers at all, leaving unsuspecting patients with tens of thousands of dollars in surprise medical bills.
