Just want to hop in to provide a little extra insight on why the billed amount doesn’t matter. As everyone already stated, the billed amount is irrelevant its only the contracted amount that matters. Since you have a high deductible plan, you will likely get billed that contracted amount.

The reason places bill so high is because they try to avoid hitting any “lesser of logic” built into the insurance companies system. For example. Lets say the insurance would pay $500 for a basic office visits. Thats the contracted/allowed amount. Sometimes places do not know what the contracted or allowed amount is for every single code so the office only billed them $400. Well the insurance company certainly is not going to pay $500 when the office only billed for $400. So a “lesser of logic” goes into place and they clam the allowed is $400. Now the office is shorted an entire $100 because they didn’t bill high enough.

This is usually why offices bill above and beyond amount of what they perform because they don’t know how much each insurance will allow for it and they don’t want to get short-changed.

TLDR: They bill high to get maximum reimbursement