Amy Frank said it took 17 hours on the phone over nearly three weeks, bouncing between her insurer and her local hospital system, to make sure her plan would cover her husband's post-surgery care.

Many of her calls never got past the hold music. When they did, the hospital told her to call her insurer. The insurer told her to have the hospital fax a form to a special number. The hospital responded that they'd been instructed to send faxes to a different number.

"It was just a big loophole we were caught in, going around and around," Frank said.

Frank and her husband, Allen, faced that ellipse of frustration because they were among 90,000 central Missouri patients caught in the middle of a contract dispute between University of Missouri and its MU Health Care, a Columbia, Missouri-based

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