athene: (aubrey)
Ugh! Just spent the last 30 min or so dealing with various and sundry medical billing situations.

1. Called to pay a bill for Little Prince from when we took him to the doctor for strep back in December. Left a voicemail. Got a call back and paid bill. Found out that his doctor can finally take payments online. Hurray! Maybe one day I'll even be able to email them for non-emergency questions.

2. Called lab company for tests I had run in Feb. Found out they'd transposed two of the letters in my insurance code, so that's why it didn't go through. They're resubmitting. I'm 90% sure they did the same thing last year. Hopefully they'll get it fixed in their system.

3. I got sent a collections letter for the ER bill from my accident last September. I never even got this bill. And Progressive told me that they were getting all hospital bills directly and not to worry about them. So first a call to the collections agency to say "what is this bill? Oh, really? It should have been taken care of." Then a call to my auto insurance saying "Oh, you did get that bill. That's interesting." Then a call to my health insurance, left message. Then a call to person-who-hit-me's auto insurance with an "On, you have that bill too. Ok. And tell collections agency that it's been worked on. Got it. Thanks." Then a text to acupuncturist to make sure she sent in release form/info to pwhm's auto insurance to get bills paid. Finally a call back from my health insurance with a "Well, what you're seeing is the full amount of the bill, but you should only be paying a negotiated amount until you hit your deductible for the year. But I can't tell you if you hit that. I can just tell you what I see." I swear, my health insurance adjuster person for this case is crazy hard to get a hold of. At least he sent the info the pwhm's auto insurance. Ugh.

Just in case people are wondering about my bills, I had $2,525 in PIP from my auto insurance. I have blown through that. In addition to that I've already paid $1,350 in payments out of pocket and still owe over $1,700 to various providers. And that's a total of over $5,500 just in medical bills. I have a High Deductible Health Plan through my employer and good car insurance. And we wonder why health insurance is so borked in this country and why people go bankrupt when they have a medical emergency. The fact that the insurance companies are playing the bounce around game is just ridiculous. At this point I'm just praying that pwhm's auto insurance comes through and offers to cover everything (like they did for Little Prince's bills). Otherwise I guess it's court and lawyers fees. Isn't that fun?

A big bump

Mar. 14th, 2013 10:54 pm
athene: (Sokka - Boomerang)
We're all okay.

The drive home from work/daycare with Little Prince sure turned out to be interesting. To start the highway was PACKED. So I tried a side route I'd never done before. It worked out really really well. We were stopped in the middle lane at the red light that brought us back to join in with the normal way home when the whole car was rocked violently forward. Yup, while sitting at the red light, the woman in the car behind us rear-ended us. It took a moment for it to register and then Little Prince started crying. I put on my blinkers and got out of the car. He looked fine and there were no obvious signs of damage either on him or to either car. The woman in the other car looked visibly shaken and upset too. She got out and claimed that the brakes on her car just stopped working suddenly. Since LP was crying and in case there were any problems, I wanted to trade information. But the light was going to be changing soon and we weren't in a good spot to deal with things. I suggested pulling into the grocery store parking lot just up the road. Then I snapped a quick picture of her license plate with my cell phone in case she decided to drive away instead.

So we drove up the road and pulled into the parking lot. She claimed she was stopped and was admiring my bumper stickers when all of a sudden her car just rolled forward into mine. Not sure I believe her 100%, but that's what she said. Apparently it's her boyfriend/fiance's car. If that's really what happened, I guess he'll be getting a talking to. I took a picture of the insurance card, so I didn't have to write it all down and wrote down her name and number.

Drove home. Comforted/nursed Little Prince and filed the claim online and they'll call me tomorrow. Can I just say I love that we have cameras on phones now. It just makes things so much easier. I had all of the information for the claim. I also love that I can file my claim over the internet.

Little Prince seems to be fine (as fine as a teething toddler the week after daylights savings time switch can be). My back and neck kind of hurt. I'm going to talk to the insurance people about where we should go to get checked out just in case.

I'm so glad that we still have LP rear facing in his car seat. I was just thinking that maybe we should start to turn him around, but I think I want to leave him rear facing longer (the seat is weighted up to 40 or 45 lbs rear facing and he's 22ish). I don't think a very low impact bump should damage his car seat, but I'll make sure to ask the insurance agent just to make sure.


Little Prince in his car seat, from a few months ago.


I will not feel guilty that I took a different route home. I will not feel guilty that I didn't pull into the other lane when I thought about it. I will not feel guilty that the straps on LP were a little looser than I'd have wanted them to be when we pulled into the parking lot. We're all fine. These things happen. I handled everything in the best way possible. The end.
athene: (violet - incredibles)
Both [livejournal.com profile] lordaerith and I are fine.

This morning as we were driving down Parmer to go to work, a deer ran across the road and into the right front side of our car. The car still runs, but the front fender panels are dented, the front passenger door is bent and won't open, and there is some cosmetic damage to the back passenger door. Also there was a noise of the front passenger tire scrapping the wheel well as we took corners on our way to get me to work.

Aerith headed to work and called the insurance company from there (I know because the claim is already in the online system & he just texted me about it). We have some rental coverage which is good because Aerith's car is still in the shop.

Of course I feel crazy guilty about all of this because we were running late because I realized as we started to leave the house that I'd left my access pass for work on my desk and had to run back in to get it. Also, I saw the deer a split second before it hit us so I'm wondering if I had said anything if we could have avoided it. Now, if I hadn't had to go back, something else might have happened. And if I had said something, maybe Aerith would have swerved just a little and then the deer would have hit the passenger door instead of the front of the car and I would have been seriously injured. And if, and if, and if...

Also, after we pulled over on the side of the road to give the car a quick check (making sure we hadn't poped a tire or anything really bad), we didn't look back to check for the deer. Of course by the time we actually got over, we probably couldn't have seen the deer anyway, and so now part of me worries that it wasn't a deer. But I know that I saw a deer because my brain went "DEER!" a second before it all happened.

So, yeah, I'm pretty shaken and my right thigh is just a touch sore and the car will need to go into the shop (which it needed to do anyway), but over all, we came out of this one okay.

Also, for the past several days I've been really jumpy about things on the right side of the car when we've been driving. Guess I don't have to be jumpy anymore.

October 2015

S M T W T F S
    123
45678910
11121314 151617
18192021222324
25262728293031

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Mar. 3rd, 2026 02:43 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios