That's both a very useful post, and also enraging that we would have to do something like that to protect ourselves from getting raped by the system.

watch what happens to that bill when you tell them you are going to pay out of pocket instead of using insurance. suddenly, everything has a different price.

I've heard this before and so I tried it, but unfortunately it was not true in my case. They didn't seem to give a crap about that. In one case they actually told me "you should run it through insurance so you get their negotiated price. otherwise it will a lot more expensive"