Nobody Can Tell Me What This Will Cost, and That Is the Point

I called four numbers to find out what a procedure would cost. I got four answers, and three of them were some version of it depends on your plan. The fourth put me on hold and then the office closed.

This is not incompetence

That was my first assumption and I think it is wrong. Every person I spoke to was trying to help. The problem is that the actual number depends on a contract between two organisations that neither of them will show me, and the person on the phone genuinely does not have access to it either.

So the honest answer to what does this cost is that nobody in the chain knows until after it happens. That is a strange thing to accept about a purchase.

The one thing that worked

Asking for the billing code. Not the price — the code. With the code I could look up the published rate, and suddenly the conversation changed from a vague range to a specific document we were both reading. It did not get me a guarantee, but it got me a number I could argue with.

I am not going to pretend that solves anything structural. It just moved me from powerless to slightly less so, which on that particular Tuesday was worth a lot.

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