I’m the perfect person to price shop for an operation. But the process went terribly

After three months of using hot compresses to shrink the stye on my daughter’s eyelid, it wasn’t getting any smaller. My daughter is prone to this sort of growth, called a chalazion. This one would have to be removed surgically, like the one she had removed from the same eyelid two years earlier.

But there was one key difference this time around: Like tens of millions of people who get health insurance through their employer, my family was now in a . That meant we would have to pay for the entire cost of the surgery out of pocket. Suddenly, the cost of the surgery became very important to our family.