Health Insurance 13

On September 20th, I got a message from the pathologist billing saying the account had been brought up with coding and there was a hold put on the account with collections. Okay, I sorta knew that already.

It's been three weeks since then (they were supposed to get back to me in two, which they did, but I hadn't heard from them in another three)
so I just called them up.

I don't really mean to be confrontational on the phone, and I don't exactly think that I was. It's likely that dealing with any of this puts one's nerves on edge, however. The conversation when like this:

"Hello, I was told to get in touch with you if I hadn't heard back in three weeks."

"Okay, well, we left a message for you on the 20th."

"Yup, I got that."

"That's when we sent out your request to coding. It should take about a month from them to hear back."

"Oh. Do you know why it took so long to get to collections?"

"Well, we sent it out on the 20th. We don't have any record of sending it out before then."

"I called back in August..."

"We see a call from you in the first week of September. Oh, and we apparently put it in the bin on August 27th." [she might have said the 25th; I don't recall]

She quickly changed the subject from the fact that my request was sitting in some elusive bin for nearly a month: "Once it's in coding, we can't do anything until we get the response from them. You should get a call in the next week and a half."

"Okay, thanks, bye."

Once I have time to get on the phone and call people again, I'll get to explain to multiple parties that the thirty day extension on each of these bills was completely used up between transfers of my request, from one party to another.

More later.