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After Susannah Reed-McCullough’s husband died in 2018, she and their young daughters continued to receive health insurance through his job as a firefighter in Maryland.

Then, in 2024, she got an unexpected medical bill: $377 for a checkup for one of her children the previous fall. Reed-McCullough said she called the doctor’s billing department and learned the insurance company had dropped the children’s coverage.

The drop turned out to be a mistake. But Reed-McCullough said she was forced to act as the go-between for her late husband’s human resources department and their insurer — all while worried about her daughters’ being uninsured.

In this installment of InvestigateTV and 51��Ƶ Health News’ “Costly Care” series, Caresse Jackman, InvestigateTV’s national consumer investigative reporter, explores how administrative errors can leave patients on the hook for medical bills they shouldn’t owe, sometimes with few options to correct a problem they didn’t create.

Jackman interviewed Elisabeth Rosenthal, senior contributing editor at 51��Ƶ Health News, who said accidental coverage drops are “a common problem” in need of attention from state regulators.

“People make mistakes, systems make mistakes, and they should be held responsible for them, not the patient,” Rosenthal said.

51��Ƶ Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at 51��Ƶ—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .