Evil Medical Bills

Sometimes you can take two things and put them together to create something wonderful.  Take for instance peanut butter and jelly, bagels and cream cheese, Ben and Jerry, the dvr and television and of course the home computer and writers.  As we all know, however, if there is an upside to a coin, there must be a downside.  Yesterday I had one of those downsides where medical billing paired with my insurance company to make a royal mess.  I was sent a hospital bill yesterday from 2013!  My daughter had a procedure done of an exploratory nature in the hospital that year.  We received a huge bill.  It took until this last January for me to pay off.  I asked if I was done and the billing specialist said my bill was all paid off.  Well, apparently that was just the bill for the doctor.  The hospital had another enormous bill just sort of floating around that they had not submitted to my insurance.  It seems the hospital has one year from the date of service to submit the bill and they waited until the very last minute.  Why they did this, I don’t know.  Then my health insurance company tells me that even though I paid more than my out of pocket maximum for that year, it wasn’t sufficiently on my daughter so they aren’t paying the bill.  The good news they told me was that this bill put my family up to the out of pocket maximum for that year.  So if any other bills from 2013 are floating around, they will be paid 100%.  As I listened on the phone, it made me want to reach out and touch someone if you know what I mean.  I explained that I had been told back in 2013 that the family had reached the maximum already but the person on the other line said that was not true until this bill came in.  We discussed the matter at length but I had no leverage.  In the end I had to call back the hospital.  I asked if they could write off part of the bill because of how much I had paid and the amount of time that went by.  They knew they had me and were unwilling to budge.  In the end, the best I could do was set up 2 years of payments at a staggering clip.  Their only advice was, “If you were a little poorer we could help you out but you’re not so you have to pay in full.”  According to them, I’m rich.  It seems you have to be really rich or really poor in order to be sick in this country.  If you are in the middle, you get the shaft.  Let me be clear, I’m not arguing for socialized medicine.  I experienced that in Canada and it nearly killed my father 25 years ago while waiting months in intensive care for a bypass surgery.  I’m just saying that when you take the insurance company on one hand and the hospital on the other and put them together, the middle gets crushed.  Oh, and here’s an amusing anecdote.  Remember all that exploratory stuff the specialists recommended and I’m paying for?  Well they found nothing and our family doctor did a simple allergy test and figured it out for a $30 copay.  I think about that every time I make a payment.