As I tell everyone new to Madison who's looking fo...

As I tell everyone new to Madison who's looking for a doctor/healthcare system: I strongly recommend that you do NOT go here. Dealing with overinflated charges and opaque billing from Meriter has been the single worst customer service experience I've ever received.

My experience was like Piyush's below. Prior to receiving an outpatient surgery (straightforward, a removal of adenoid tissue), I attempt to find out from multiple people at Meriter what the cost would be. Each told me they would get back to me, and I never heard back. I looked online at various sources and saw that total costs for adenoidectomy ran at most, $5k-$10k.

After the surgery, I received a professional services and hospital services bill of ~$2,000, after my insurance paid their portion. Given that that represented the 10% coinsurance I was responsible for, they billed a total of $20,000 (!) for the 1.5 hour procedure (if it even took that long - I fully expect that they took 1/2 that time but billed for the booked OR time). Insane.

Afterwards, after spending hours on the phone, nobody could tell me why exactly it cost that much. Multiple labs and tissue samples were included on the bill, none of which anyone could satisfactorily explain to me, and only one or two of which I was told about beforehand. Every item looked inflated past real-world belief ($150 for that hospital paper gown?), such that no single item really popped out.

Then, two years later, after reconciling an anesthesia bill, a hospital services bill, and a professional services bill, I find out that I have yet another bill, which I never received, which is now in collections. Turns out they contracted a surgical pathology consult out to another group, which failed to bill me properly. Nobody told me about this bill. Nobody told me I received this service. It's a game of "imagine every possible thing you think they could charge you for, add a zero to the end of what you think it'll cost, then draw twice as many blank lines for them to write in everything you failed to imagine."

And my doctor (ENT) was awful as well.

Sleazy and rotten, all the way through.