Can one refuse to pay a doctor's bill when there was no treatment or diagnosis provided?

You can refuse. And they can send you to collections. To truly make the bill go away you would have to persuade them to drop it or go to small claims court.

I don’t know if you can, but I would refuse IF you did not have an opportunity to see the doctor.

However, if the doctor said there was nothing wrong with you, you went there for their professional opinion and you got it, whether you liked the answer or not. You are free to get a second opinion. I think that’s where you are stuck with the bill. I suppose you can fight it, but it’s one of those consultation things where their time and their expertise is the issue, not whether you disagreed with the diagnosis.

You may be paying for the office visit, and not really for the non-treatment or non-diagnosis. You can call the office and ask what it is you’re paying for, or if you look at the receipt they gave you, it should say it on there. It may be coded, but usually the number of the code will be listed somewhere on that receipt. If it is the office visit fee, then there’s nothing that you can really do. It’s basically paying for the time you spent there. Everybody pays for the office visit. Sometimes if you’re coming back for a recheck, to just check ears or throat or something that takes just a second to do, a doctor won’t charge, but for the first time, you pay.

If you walked out feeling dissatisfied with the care you received, you might consider writing a coherent and polite letter to the office manager. Sometimes charges are written off in the name of good customer relations.

You left out your co-payment fee of $10 or $20 dollars. apparently, you went to your doctor and he told you absolutely nothing? then, why did you go? you left out some very important details. we need details.

I did once. I wrote a polite letter explaining why I was dissatisfied and they waived the office visit fee, but I still needed to pay for all the lab work.

You are paying for the doctor’s time.

How did it even occur that there was no trearment and no diagnosis? What was said?

Agree with @Marina. You’re paying for the doctor’s time. And sometimes there is nothing wrong to make a diagnosis.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think we’d have specialists if one doctor could magically diagnose us in one visit. I’d need more details on why you feel they did nothing. Maybe there was nothing wrong with you. You still took up their time.

In my case the doctor I was scheduled to see, who was a specialist, went on maternity leave. I didn’t find out I was seeing a different doctor until almost the end of the visit. I had never been there before, so I didn’t know any of them. I ended up re-scheduling with the original doctor a couple of months later, who gave me a proper diagnoses and treatment.

@ All: This was not a personal encounter which I experienced; this was very simply a customer service question… @ casheroo: You took my time; should I bill you too? ;))

@CorwinofAmber It is not the same thing at all. You went to see the doctor in a professional setting with an expectation of payment.