HELP. Billing department filed claim incorrectly, didn’t receive bill until almost a year later, and now we’re screwed because it’s been more than 200 days

My husband (36M, Vermont) received a bill in early October 2023 from our primary care for $1,600 for a visit in November of 2022. He had an x-ray after his annual physical and the charges are for that.

He called his health insurance (Cigna) and discovered that the claim was filed incorrectly as a “preventative” claim (?) instead of part of his regular annual physical.

Unfortunately there is a 200 day limit on claim filings and we’re past that, so the claim can’t be resubmitted.

Cigna says the claim was submitted in December 2022, so our primary care has been sitting on this bill since then and didn’t send it to us until a few weeks ago.

Cigna told us to file a claim appeal on healthcare.gov (?) which we will look into tonight. It seems incredibly unfair that our primary care billing department screwed this up and now we’re stuck with this bill.

We’re also very concerned that our primary care billing department will put this into collections while the claim appeal is going on and we’re not sure how to prevent that from happening.

Does anyone have any advice?