After talking to the nice man on the phone, I found out there was an unpaid bill from our local Emergency Physcians from October. I check all my flex pays and Explanations of Benefits and told the man honestly, I never received that bill. I'm sure he hears this all day long, but it was the truth.
After calling our local hospital and finding that they don't bill for the emergency room doctors, I finally get the right number to call.
After talking to the nice lady on the phone, she immediately says I see why you were turned into collections BEFORE we billed you. Your account is marked homeless. I'm trying to keep my temper, when I want to shout not so nice things, I simply asked, why wouldn't you double check that information before sending directly to collections? BTW, how do you collect on a homeless person?
After being on hold for
My brain is asking a hunderd questions:
Does this happen so much that the girl is backed up several days?
Why am I charged $69 in addition to the $524 fee for a Doctor to be in the ER after hours, when he was in our room a sum total of 5 minutes? and he took the night job? and does every patient pay $69 fee between 5 pm and 9 am? Hmmm, something is seriously wrong here!
Why would they mark me as homeless when the hospital and radiology deparment of the same hospital got my address correct?
Why is taking my son to the hospital for a concussion in October so expensive? It cost over $1000 before insurance kicked in....I paid $500 out of my pocket. Plus, I paid an additional $65 fee for the radiologist to read the CAT scan the same evening for after hours visit. We were at the hospital a total of 1.5 hours. Most of it waiting on the radiologist to read the report!
Just sayin' this is ridiculous!
And they want to overhaul health care. Nothing will work until each hospital gets their act together. I had a very well know hospital tell me our insurance was no good at their hospital that we did not have out of network care this is after my husband had been in for ten days and been told he has leukemia. Iabout fainted becase we would be homeless because who could pay that bill? I called my insurance and they had no idea what that hospital was talking about they were in network and we have out of network and for me to take a big breath it was ok.
ReplyDeleteand 69.00 for after hours that is what they are for after hours when the doctor is closed.
Good Lord it's enough to make you scream.
Cathy
Medical costs are the pits, you are right. Your questions are right on too. Good thing your are a detective with much patience in order to straighten it all out.
ReplyDeleteThe ER is so expensive that it's outrageous. And this experience of yours just adds insult to injury.
ReplyDelete"/
Welcome to my world...and I work in a hospital. The same one you probably got the big bills from. Computers haven't made it any easier and the hospital employees are not making the salaries that you may think the bills are covering. My Sister received a bill for $5000.00 from the ER Doc who only came into the trauma room for 5min and declared her son's time of death..and he never came out to tell her that her child had died. He was angry that he got woke up at 1am..then he just went back to bed. The government wants to "govern" health care and also control insurance companies. This is going to get much worse before it ever gets better, which it probably won't. Sorry but true.
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