This was in Ohio. We asked our hospital if an MRI was covered by our insurance. They said everything was covered. However, they then sent the imaging to a third-party company without notifying us or giving us an opportunity to choose another provider. That company is not in our insurance network, and they sent us a bill for several thousand dollars to read the MRI.

I'm questioning the legality of the hospital telling us everything was covered, then sending our images to a third-party company without consent or an opportunity to choose someone else, get it pre-approved with insurance, etc. We would have chosen a different hospital for the MRI if we had known they would send these results out, since the third-party company charges a hefty fee for reading MRIs and other facilities (who read MRIs in-house) would have been covered by our insurance.

I realize we signed the electronic screen for "consent for treatment" and "agreement to pay," but we were never presented with any actual documentation for what we were signing and - more importantly - we were told our insurance would cover everything. In my mind, if the hospital elected to outsource the work we agreed to pay the hospital for, the hospital should cover that if our insurance doesn't OR the hospital should have given us an opportunity to select an in-network provider to read the MRIs.

Do we have any legal recourse?