Comment by jsmith45

To be clear, they are billing for all the coded line items at the listed prices, it is just that the agreements with the insurance company will disallow many of the line items in favor of other ones. They bill everything, because they may accept some insurance that has not negotiated a day rate, and in that case, the day rate code would be disallowed and some of the other line items will be paid at relevant negotiated rates instead (with others still likely disallowed). It needs to be the same bill in both cases, so they need to include everything, and the list prices need to be greater than or equal to what any insurance would pay, or they might lose out on the difference.

This is one of the areas where more standardization would certainly help. If there were more standardization of which codes disallow which other ones (which can currently vary wildly by plan even with the same insurer, must less across insurers), then a lot of line items could actually get removed as truly redundant, vastly simplifying the bill.