Athene Numphe

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?