Be careful. I did this exact thing with my first child, but they billed my insurance company for the 35% they discounted, anyway. After something like 50 phone calls and hours and hours on the phone with people who said they would "take care of it", I finally got taken to collections and ended up paying it to avoid damaging my credit.

I haven't looked at it in a couple of years, but medicare used to publish what they pay, and the random adjustments based on location and other factors i don't recall.

medicare doesn't negotiate. they just pay a fixed cost up front.

data is still on the CMS website: https://data.cms.gov

Think of it this way, if $3250 is going towards deductibles all the time, your deductibles and other insurance costs would also be lower by 35%.

You mean because insurance quotes your copays as % amounts, not $ amounts?

Yes I think that's what I mean. We have a $5k individual deductible. After a deductible is met, we pay 20% coinsurance. Before the deductible we pay 100%.

Making up some numbers, my wife had already spent $3k on the OB-GYN which counts toward the deductible. The hospital billed us $7500. So $2k we pay to finish meeting the deductible and then 20% of the remaining $5500 is $1500, so our portion of the hospital bill is $3500.

If the insurance company knew we'd get a discount on our portion of the final bill, that calculation for how much of the bill we'd only have to pay 20% of would be different.