Dealing with Health Insurance, Part 2
I just got off the phone with Boston Medical Center. (It's kind of tricky to find a 1-800 number for them, but with a bit of website searching I found one. For my and anyone else's reference, that number is: 1-800-841-4325.) My conversation with the billing person started like this:
"Hi... I have some questions about some bills I didn't receive."
"You have questions about bills you didn't recieve?"
The nice lady told me she would send me something explaining all the different charges I had accumulated. She said I should have gotten something from Walker Associates, their bill-outsourcing people, but I certainly haven't. (Note: this is completely different from the Argent people who called me last week. Who are they billing me from?)
She said there were 5 different bills, and it seems pretty clear that insurance isn't going to cover all of them. Now I'm a bit scared. Do I have other charges that went beyond the $5000? How much money am I going to owe here?
More updates when I see these bills...
On an interestingly related note, it seems Michael Moore has a new flick, "Sicko" coming out. It's supposedly all about the health care system here in Americaland. Should be interesting.
I've been a fan of universal health care since I first took a real interest in politics, but actually being in the middle of all the uncertainties and billing run-around sheds an even harsher light on the situation. As the patient, I feel most left out of the loop; it's a strenuous task to aquire all the information I want. Dealing with more than one entity is hard enough, but it looks like I'm going to be dealing with 5 (hospital, doctor's office, 2 bill collectors and insurance?).
Hindsight instructs that it would have been best to attempt to find the price tag for the surgery, then go through my insurance guidelines and see if it fell under there, likely meaning within that $5000. This appears to be a better plan than just asking, "will this be covered?"
There are some flaws with that plan, however. The first of these is that the price tag simply isn't known in advance. When first talking to my doctor about my surgery, he explained that they weren't sure exactly what they were going to remove/fix in my face and throat until they got in there. For example, they were considering removing my adenoids, but they didn't as it wasn't necessary.
Secondly, the price tag is never what is actually gets charged once the insurance is involved. Health insurance negotiates with the medical people to pay a lower price. They apparently have some clout that patients don't have. In any case, had I seen an estimate for the surgery, I might have been scared out of having it done, even if the insurance could have negotiated it down to something within my coverage.
The worst case here is that I could have been scared out of having the operation. I was sick: I wasn't sleeping at night and I was falling asleep (literally, in my chair) at work. My apnea was getting worse and worse, and the usual methods of fixing it, the breathing machines, wouldn't work for me. I was trying to get 9 hours of sleep each night, but felt like I was getting less than 4 hours of the kind of sleep I get now.
... okay, enough ranting. As promised, I will update you when I get those elusive bills :-P
"Hi... I have some questions about some bills I didn't receive."
"You have questions about bills you didn't recieve?"
The nice lady told me she would send me something explaining all the different charges I had accumulated. She said I should have gotten something from Walker Associates, their bill-outsourcing people, but I certainly haven't. (Note: this is completely different from the Argent people who called me last week. Who are they billing me from?)
She said there were 5 different bills, and it seems pretty clear that insurance isn't going to cover all of them. Now I'm a bit scared. Do I have other charges that went beyond the $5000? How much money am I going to owe here?
More updates when I see these bills...
On an interestingly related note, it seems Michael Moore has a new flick, "Sicko" coming out. It's supposedly all about the health care system here in Americaland. Should be interesting.
I've been a fan of universal health care since I first took a real interest in politics, but actually being in the middle of all the uncertainties and billing run-around sheds an even harsher light on the situation. As the patient, I feel most left out of the loop; it's a strenuous task to aquire all the information I want. Dealing with more than one entity is hard enough, but it looks like I'm going to be dealing with 5 (hospital, doctor's office, 2 bill collectors and insurance?).
Hindsight instructs that it would have been best to attempt to find the price tag for the surgery, then go through my insurance guidelines and see if it fell under there, likely meaning within that $5000. This appears to be a better plan than just asking, "will this be covered?"
There are some flaws with that plan, however. The first of these is that the price tag simply isn't known in advance. When first talking to my doctor about my surgery, he explained that they weren't sure exactly what they were going to remove/fix in my face and throat until they got in there. For example, they were considering removing my adenoids, but they didn't as it wasn't necessary.
Secondly, the price tag is never what is actually gets charged once the insurance is involved. Health insurance negotiates with the medical people to pay a lower price. They apparently have some clout that patients don't have. In any case, had I seen an estimate for the surgery, I might have been scared out of having it done, even if the insurance could have negotiated it down to something within my coverage.
The worst case here is that I could have been scared out of having the operation. I was sick: I wasn't sleeping at night and I was falling asleep (literally, in my chair) at work. My apnea was getting worse and worse, and the usual methods of fixing it, the breathing machines, wouldn't work for me. I was trying to get 9 hours of sleep each night, but felt like I was getting less than 4 hours of the kind of sleep I get now.
... okay, enough ranting. As promised, I will update you when I get those elusive bills :-P
posted by Kyle at 9:39 AM
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