Murder is wrong.

That’s an unusually #HotTake from the editorial board here at 1 Scaianalysis Esplanade, but we feel strongly about it.

We all know murder is wrong. Just a few of us have been sharing our experiences with health insurance since the UnitedHealthcare chief executive was killed, and you’ve been gathering around the dining room table with your family thinking, “I’d like to hear how Scaia feels about the insurance industry. A ScaiaTribe, if you will.”

You may not have heard (it’s not as though I write about it incessantly), but I got to know the insurance industry very closely about ten years ago.

A couple weeks after a follow-up surgery, I got a call from the hospital’s billing department. The gentleman explained I was about to get a bill for $13,000, but don’t pay it.

“I’m happy to oblige,” I responded.

He said my insurance had preapproved the surgery, but now they were trying to back out of it. He said that happens frequently, so they just had to mail me an invoice so they could show a paper trail to the Texas Department of Insurance and get it taken care of.

“All these decisions are reviewed by a physician,” your insurance company will tell you after denying a claim. Surely, many of these physicians graduated in the top 95% of their class.

I know several doctors in different specialties. I’m sure they settled on fields like neurology, obstetrics or oncology when they couldn’t get their dream job reviewing insurance claims.

But hospitals aren’t perfect either. I had the pleasure of my first colonoscopy recently. To take my mind off the prep, the surgery center helped by distracting me with paperwork explaining my balance due would be “How much you got?”

I paid the invoices I received. Then, for my convenience, the surgery center sent me to collections. I called the center; they explained it was a mistake and they were correcting it.

So imagine my dismay when, several weeks later, I was still getting emails and phone calls from a debt collector. I called the surgery center back. They didn’t respond.

I had to file a complaint with the Texas attorney general and call the main Baylor Scott and White billing office. The billing office pulled up my record.

“Hmmm,” the woman who took my call said, frowning through the phone. “According to your account, you paid each invoice immediately. You don’t owe any money.”

I’m not sure which phone call actually got the billing folks at the surgery center to learn how to work a computer machine, but the collector went away after that.

That brings us back to the reason for this blog. The doctors at the surgery center were competent; it was just people who work in the front office who weren’t particularly bright.

Like the hospital that told me not to pay a bill, a lot of doctors don’t like dealing with insurance companies, either. The doctor in that video was later threatened by UnitedHealthCare because their public relations geniuses didn’t think they had received enough bad press.

Years ago, a Congressman who has since retired told me to imagine if health insurance worked more like car insurance. Then he backtracked and suggested I do the opposite: Imagine if car insurance worked like health insurance.

If the quick lube place down the street had to file a claim every time you wanted your oil changed, do you think you’d get in and out for $30? They’d have to pay a couple full-timers to handle claims and paperwork.

Your car insurance would then cost more because they’re employing the worst mechanics to decide whether you really need that oil change.

Mark Cuban and the former Congressman seem to see eye-to-eye on this. We’re paying for bureaucracy, not healthcare.

Also, imagine how much the mechanic would charge if you had no idea how much the oil change would cost. Most hospitals are not following the rules for price transparency.

The guy who warned me about the hospital bill I shouldn’t pay said if I did wind up paying out of pocket, I’d owe a small fraction. I don’t remember how much, but it was less than half. They worked it out amongst themselves, though.

But #ScaiaBlog is about hope. Maybe you feel lost, like you can’t find your place in this world. Instead of complaining about the system, we can all come together and start a volunteer organization to help people who work at surgery centers learn to do math.