I never just pay a bill that comes in.
Today I got a bill for Micah's healthcare. Date of services is 9/12/2008. Yes, almost a YEAR ago. The bill is for $5863.64. It's from a company I've never heard of in a city that's 2+ hours away. Yes, on that date Micah had a procedure. At a hospital 30 minutes south of here. That amount was billed to insurance. The rate was drastically reduced, and our insurance paid. So why am I hearing from someone about it NOW??
You probably already know this...but for what it's worth, my guess is that it is another component to the procedure that just is being found on audit. In other words, you paid a bill for the hospital, but this might be for the physician, or anesthesiologist, or for some radiology done at the procedure...something like that. Each entity with a different tax id number will send a separate bill. This sounds like something that got mixed up in coding somewhere and errored out of a bill, then when they were reviewing unresolved accounts this came up on a list and whatever was wrong was fixed. So it kicked out a bill.
ReplyDeleteI just received a bill from 18 months ago, too, but no $$ like this. Since I worked in this stuff for years, it makes me even more frustrated to see accounts departments handle things so poorly.
You are hearing from them now because the insurance company just processed it. I hate that and it is so frustrating!
ReplyDeleteYou're right to always question things. Last year I opened an EOB and was shocked to see that I'd been seeing a psychologist at the diagonal opposite end of the state (4 1/2 hours away).
ReplyDeleteAnd it actually was difficult to correct. I was on the phone for a long time with that one, because why would they ever admit that they might be making a mistake? (even one that saved them money!)
I'm going back to that insurance company in the next week, and I will be checking everything with a fine tooth comb.