Thought I would update this post. This ended up being a foreboding thread for me. Just 4 days after my post above, my wife blew out her knee skiing. Tore her ACL and required surgery.
For the most part everything except the surgeon's fee is settled and so far we've paid $7,322.27. The total amount of bills submitted to Medishare so far has been just over $30,000 and they have applied over $17,000 of discounts on those bills based on their PPO agreements. The Surgeon bill was $6,000 and required a prepayment of $2,400 (already included in the $7,300 noted above) but for some reason Medishare hasn't settled that bill yet so not sure what the final tally will be but it looks like we will slip in under the deductible amount.
Having the PPO discount really made a HUGE difference on the bigger bills, the hospital bill for the surgery was $11,998 by itself but they negotiated it down to $2,300. I wouldn't have thought the hospital would have accepted that big of a haircut, but we had actually prepaid them $6,100 and they sent us a refund check for the difference.
So overall it seems the Medishare worked pretty well for us.
The good news is that the surgery went really well and my wife is pretty much back to walking 100% normally again. She is a runner and is chomping at the bit ready to start running again but they are telling her that she still needs to wait a bit more before she can start running again and they don't want her on skis again for at least a year. Looks like our annual Christmas ski vacation may need to be at the beach or something like that this year.
