As someone who knows healthcare pretty intimately, even I have no idea how Natera does their billing My wife and I both used Natera to see if there were any potential hereditary diseases we should look out for when having a baby. But the billing for this was more confusing than trying to actually read my own genetic code. I got a bill for $13K+ that I was told to pay because insurance denied it. What?? That doesn’t seem right. So I emailed the OB’s office and they said “oh yeah don’t worry, we’ll ask them to adjust it”. Then suddenly it became a cash pay price of $649? Even more confusing is my wife somehow negotiated a price of $349? Everything is made up ahhhh why does this feel like I’m haggling in a wet market. To this day I still don’t know what happened here. But talking to other parents in the OOP slack group and perusing the Better Business Bureau complaints it’s clear this is relatively common. Try billing insurance, leave the patient with the full bill if the plan denies the test, then offer a much cheaper cash-pay price which seems like a great deal. It’s clear that OB’s know this is an issue since they knew exactly what to do when I got the egregious bill. In general this was probably the only truly negative billing experience through our pregnancy, and it also just goes to show how strange the shenanigans around lab billing are. Feels like the providers or Natera should really be checking your insurance eligibility for the tests before ordering them. But why do something that makes sense! It’s healthcare!