Guides
Healthcare, explained without the sales pitch.
Practical answers about medical bills, hospital charity care, surprise billing and getting a price before you are treated. Free to read, no membership needed, and written to be useful even if you never become a CoreMed member.
Medical bills
What to do when the bill is more than you can pay, and the rights most people never use.
Hospital charity care in Montana
Most Montana hospitals are legally required to have a programme that can reduce your bill to nothing. Hardly anyone knows to ask.
Getting a price before you are treated
If you are paying cash, you have a legal right to a written price before scheduled care. Most people never ask for it.
Surprise bills and balance billing
Some bills you are simply not allowed to be sent. Knowing which ones is worth real money.
Read the itemised bill first
The one-line summary is not a bill. Ask for the itemised version, then check these six things.
Life changes
The moments where the default option is expensive and the window to choose is short.
Turning 26
You age off your parent's plan at 26. The window to act is short and the default is expensive.
You just lost your health plan
Job gone, plan gone. There is a 60-day window and a default option that is usually the wrong one.
You need care tonight and you are paying for it
The same problem can cost $150 or $3,000 depending on which door you walk through.
For employers
What a Montana business is actually required to do, and what the options really cost.
Why we publish these
Most healthcare information online is written by somebody trying to sell you something, which is why so much of it is vague. These guides name the rules, cite the source and tell you what to say on the phone.
CoreMed sells memberships, and we are not pretending otherwise. But a guide that steers you toward us when a hospital charity care programme would wipe out your bill entirely is worth nothing to you and not much to us either. So where the honest answer is something other than CoreMed, these pages say so.
If something here is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
What Montana hospitals actually charge
We pulled every Montana hospital's federally required price file and put the numbers side by side: list price, self-pay price, and what insurers really pay for the same billing code. Free, no membership needed.