Do I have to pay a bill if the doctor said insurance would cover the visit and it didn't?
Yes, the providers are almost certainly allowed to do this and it's not a scam  I am not familiar with specific laws in North Carolina, so there may be other factors at play. But the major issue is this:  Doctors and other clinical staff are not experts on your insurance policy, nor do they have access to it. They do not, and usually cannot, know exactly what your insurance will and will not cover. It's not clear from the description of events that the doctor's office actually assured you that the visit would be covered, and in my experience providers are pretty cagey about guaranteeing that sort of thing for the reason bolded above-- providers can't look at your insurance policy. If they try to bill and the claims are rejected, then you're on the hook because you did receive the services. A provider can usually tell you if they are in the provider network for a given insurer, but that's often the most reliable information they can give you. If you want to schedule medical services only under a condition that your insurance will pay, the burden of determining who will be responsible for the bill is on you. The way that you would do this would be to contact your insurer and ask about the specific service you want, and they can tell you if your policy will cover it. Even this is not quite a guarantee, as the insurer cannot know how the provider will bill the service and will have very limited ability to make them bill in a certain way. It may or may not have been an issue in this case, but it is also important to bear in mind that it is not a binary situation between "covered" and "not covered". Depending on the specifics of your policy it's possible that your insurance will cover a service but that there will still be some portion (up to 100%!) which you are responsible for paying. For example, if you have a deductible that hasn't been met you may need to pay for the entire visit out of pocket even though, had your deductible been met, the insurance may have paid the entire bill.