Hey there, we've been taking a break from full episodes, but here's a mini story and a little

lesson I've been meaning to bring you for a while because when you get a big medical bill,

you are often being yanked into a rough game with super complicated rules and the other players

are these big experienced professionals and they got tons of training and coaches helping them

from the sidelines and often very chummy relationships with the refs. I'm talking about hospitals and

insurance companies and anybody else who's involved with that medical bill and us we're like

wait, what is this game even called? What are the rules? Did I just get fouled? What is going on?

So this story is from the Bill of the Month series that our pals at Kaiser Health News do with NPR.

I help out with a bunch of those, but I do not always share them here because honestly,

a lot of them are more enraging and terrifying and depressing than entertaining and powering and

useful. This one is different because the person who sent this bill to NPR, Adam Woodrum,

he actually knew how this part of the game was played and he wanted our help to share what he

knew. Here's how the story went out on NPR. I'll circle back with you at the end to wrap up the

lesson. One Sunday last July, Adam Woodrum and his wife and their two kids took off on a bike ride

around Carson City, Nevada where they lived. I'd mapped out kind of a 10 mile route and we were

just going to kind of make a loop of the city. But a couple miles in, their nine-year-old son

hid a snack. We were navigating through some big tree planters and his hand of our caught and

it just almost instantaneously. He was on the ground crying bleeding and I'm no doctor, but you

know right away you can tell that this is a stitches situation. At the ER, they actually had to put

the poor kid under. He was cut in sort of a personal area. Just to say that. A few weeks later,

Adam's insurance company writes him, the total charges are 19,000 and they say you are on the hook

for all of it. It's just ridiculous. And in the fine print, it said, we're denying this claim,

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