Man Receives $12,000 Bill From Health Insurance Company For 'Lab Work' Done 3 Months Prior
It's not just ridiculous, it's potentially illegal.
fizkes | Shutterstock America's healthcare system is far too often an infuriating nightmare — as we've all been discussing ad nauseam since the Luigi Mangione case took over our feeds.
A situation with a surprise medical bill that TikToker @andr3wsky was hit with is a perfect example of why there is so much anger about this system, especially since what happened to him is likely illegal.
He received a $12,000 bill from his health insurance company for 'lab work' done 3 months prior.
It's worth noting that Andrew is not just a wildly popular TikToker but also an attorney, whose high-paying job likely comes with better health insurance than a lot of us have — which goes to show that even top-dollar insurance doesn't protect people from the cartoonishly usurious nonsense of the American healthcare industry.
"You all are not gonna [expletive] believe this," Andrew all but spat into his phone at the beginning of his video in a moment of instantly relatable outrage. "This morning I woke up to an email from my health insurer, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield," he went on to say.
That company name may sound familiar to you — they are the insurer that was forced to scuttle their plans to begin limiting the amount of anesthesia they would cover for surgeries in certain states, including Missouri where Andrew lives, amid the uproar over the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024.
Andrew's bill was for lab work performed months prior at a lab he was not told was out of network.
In the email, Andrew angrily said, was "an 'explanation of benefits' saying that I owe twelve [expletive] thousand dollars for some lab work I had done back in September."
Andrew explained that he indeed had a doctor's visit in September, "and when I made that appointment I was very careful to choose a doctor that was in-network, at a place that was in-network."
That made no difference, however. When he was asked if he wanted to do some lab work, he assumed it was a necessary part of his treatment and agreed. But at no point was it mentioned that the lab doing the work was out-of-network for his insurance.
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"No one explained that it's gonna cost me twelve [expletive] thousand dollars to get this lab work done," Andrew said, joking that "for 12 grand I could fly to Paris, get the lab work done, spend three months in Paris doing whatever it is Parisians do — eating baguettes and sighing non-committally, I guess — and then come back to the United States!"
It left him, quite understandably, furious. "Everything about [this country] is a [expletive] con," he ranted, "designed to take money out of your wallet and put it into the wallets of people who are vastly more wealthy than you could ever [expletive] imagine." And people wonder why Mangione became a folk hero.
Surprise medical bills like Andrew's are potentially a violation of the No Surprises Act, a federal law that went into effect in 2022.
Congress passed the No Surprises Act, which aims to tackle problems precisely like Andrew's — what's happened to him is, in fact, one of the Act's very definitions of "surprise medical bill."
"One form involves bills for services received from a health care provider or facility that you did not know was out-of-network (e.g., had not negotiated a reimbursement rate with your insurance company) until you were billed," the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's web page about the Act reads.
Under the law, Andrew likely can appeal the bill and have it reduced, unless he signed a consent form waiving his right to do so. Which is great — and while the legislation is profoundly flawed (it only applies to helicopter ambulances, not ground ones, for example) it's good that we at least now have SOME protection from these deceptive practices.
But in the end that's not the point — Andrew shouldn't HAVE to do any of this in the first place after paying thousands of dollars in insurance premiums and making sure his doctor was in-network. Worse still, it's not unlikely the situation will become even more fraught while he appeals the bill.
A friend of mine, for instance, was sent to collections for an erroneous $100,000 medical bill when the hospital and her insurer's efforts to rectify the situation stretched past the bill's due date — all while the baby she'd just given birth to was still fighting for his life in the NICU, by the way.
This system is not just cruel and barbaric, it's also incredibly stupid, and it wastes inordinate time and money — including taxpayer dollars. But hey, it also very lucratively lines the pockets of healthcare corporations and all the politicians too greedy and cowardly to do anything about it. So at least it's not a total wash.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.