04/10/2026
THIS! This is our hometown and these are real hospitals. Its worth the time to read and goes to show how crooked medical system is.
YES. We are a cash based office and do not submit to insurance. This right here is why!!
BUT, the amount you pay for your visit is the amount owed. No more, no less. You WILL NOT get a surprise bill from us later. We also don’t charge astronomical rates for services.
*Monday morning update 4/13 We are SET! Everything has been handled. Medical Cory administration has been great in the wake of everything & they are taking care of everything for us.
*Friday Night Update : I spent a good chunk of the day trying to get answers from the hospital. I will say, the administrator Med City Surgery Center has been absolutely fabulous! She reached out to me late last night, spoke with me this morning, and has pretty much kept me up-to-date on all that she knows. It sounds like our current balance at the surgery center for the surgery that I mentioned is zero dollars. However, we have unveiled another hiccup over at the actual hospital now for a separate bill that was $16,000 and apparently our insurance only paid $350 toward it. It sounds like hospital administrators are trying to dig into it and see what they can do for us. I’m grateful for everyone over at both medical city Hospital and medical city surgery center who were willing to try to talk us through things today*
Struggling to make it make sense…
Our oldest daughter slipped and fell on the ice in the middle of the storm back in January. She broke her ankle pretty badly and ended up needing surgery.
We were told that the price to have her surgery at Methodist McKinney would be $21,000.
We asked her surgeon if he does surgery anywhere else and he said he does it at Medical City Surgery Center too.
We called over there, on a bit of a time crunch because she needed her surgery quickly and they said they would do the same surgery for $8000.
$21,000 versus $8000 seemed like a no-brainer, so we went with the Medical City Surgery Center.
They told our daughter (who is 24) that she would have to make the full payment before they would be willing to do the surgery. She has a decent job, but the cost of living in McKinney is also pretty high, so she certainly didn’t have $8000 burning a hole in her pocket.
We don’t carry traditional insurance because to be honest, we don’t trust it any more than we trust the hospital systems that they are billing astronomical amounts of money to. We do have a nontraditional insurance plan but it’s usually better to pay cash & sort out the details later.
Dan and I agreed to pay for the surgery upfront and someone in the billing department had mentioned that she could apply for financial aid and be refunded if she was approved.
She had her surgery and then applied for financial aid. I will say, the surgery went very well and her surgeon did a wonderful job.
The financial aid folks accidentally put in her annual earnings as her monthly earnings and denied the financial aid application. When she got the denial, we called and asked why, and discovered that they had made a mistake. Then they agreed to give her financial aid and refund what we had paid for the surgery.
We thought the whole process had worked out pretty well and we were grateful.
Then today, we got a bill for $9500.
We called to find out what the bill was for, and they explained it as ….
When you applied for a financial aid, we changed the amount that we were billing for the procedure from $8000 to $17,000.
Then we applied $7500 worth of financial aid and the balance due is $9500.
I asked her why we were not notifying that they changed the price from $8000 to $17,000. She said “That’s standard when you apply for financial aid”.
We asked her if she understood that the initial amount that we had paid with $8000 and now that they were claiming that we owed $9500 AFTER financial aid.
She said, “Yes. But we took a big chunk of money off of your bill”.
Again, I repeated to her that we now owed $1500 more than we owed before they applied the financial aid - and I asked her how that was possible.
She kept repeating… “That is standard”.
My head was literally spinning on the phone.
So, we initially owed $8000 & paid it. Then you refunded it & billed us $17,000 instead. Then applied $7500 worth of “financial aid” & made out bill $9,500, which is more than we were originally obligated to pay?
Her reply, “Yes, maam. That is correct”.
I couldn’t even continue the conversation.
THIS is why we, Americans as a whole … have a distrust of the medical system.
This is why people are shying away from doctors, hospitals, medical facilities, surgery centers etc.
Because NONE of it ever makes sense.
Why was one place $21,000 for the exact same doctor to do the same surgery & the other (literally in the same city / same doctor) $8000?
What could one facility possibly be providing for the additional $13,000 when both the doctor and the procedure remain the same?
And how in the world is a person on a limited income supposed to come up with $8,000 up front… only to later be told that her bill was swapped out to $17,000 after she applied for financial aid (without any notification at all).
It’ll never make any sense to me if I live to be 100.
And this right here is why we work so hard to be healthy / stay healthy … because when we fall into the hands of hospitals / medical facilities, we get raked over the coals, blind-sighted & leave feeling utterly confused & frustrated. 
Lord help the American medical system & what it has become… and more importantly, the people who don’t have friends / families / parents to help pay for medical procedures up front.
What a mess.
*edited to add that someone from medical city McKinney has reached out to me and agreed to try to talk about things tomorrow. I am extremely hopeful that I will have a positive update soon. I will certainly let y’all know if so.
