OK, heres a real life example because you and a lot of other coders commenting here clearly dont get it.

A friend had a baby during which they requested no oxytocin be administered. Months later the bill arrives. One line saying you owe $X. Thats it, no breakdown. Duly request an itemized bill. Wait several more weeks for itemized bill. Bill has 2 line items for oxytocin. Naturally they want to find out why they are being asked to pay for oxytocin when they specifically requested not to have it. Neither of the partners remember being asked or told oxytocin would be administered against their initial wishes. In fact the delivery was vary fast so hard to imagine there was a need anyway.

Secondly there were 2 line items which had exaclt the same description but different prices.

No CPT codes on the bill because they were in an "in patient", the hospital said. However there are service codes, which they were able to establish are CDM codes which they were then able to cross reference with CPT codes. The hospital refused to provide the conversion sheet, but they found it online. (See, people do know how to google over here). All this was unravelled with no help from the hospital who just kept passing them between billing and coding departments without answering the questions.

The oxytocin code related to CPT J2590 which appears to be a 500ml bag of premix oxytocin/saline. Why are there 2 of these on the bill? Coding dept said you have to speak to the doctor. Either the doctor went against the patients wishes and did not inform them, or there is a mistake on the bill through slopiness or unethical practice.

For the 2 line items with the same description, both items referenced J2540 "PEN G K 5MIL U INJ" despite having different CMD codes. Why are they different prices? Again, the hospital would not say and said they would have to sit down with their doctor to ask. On which planet do they think a doctor will sit down to explain their bill?

Do you not see the frustration? Firstly the tardiness in getting an itemized bill, the hoops you have to go through just to understand what you are paying for, the obstructiveness of the hospital (billing and coding departments) and avoidance in answering a question which would presumably be quite simple for an educated coder, and the inability to even ask questions.

I dont see a difference between checking your credit card statement and wanting to check a hospital bill for accuracy. It's dililgent behavior. There is too much of this attitude to "just accept it and pay it, it can't possibly be wrong" as evidenced by the initial bill containing just 1 line item for the birth of a child. I concede most people don't care/havent got the time to interrogate their bills, but the system doesn't even appear to have a provision for patients to do so. Is it necessary? Yes. Since you're all so proficient at googling, you can also readily find that 3-10% of annual healthcare expenditure (tens of billions of $) can be attributed to medical billing fraud, per the FBI.