Along with the worldwide pandemic, things are feeling a little end-of-the-worldish, are they not? There's even a plague of locusts in Africa. So the four horsemen -- Pestilence, Famine, Death, and War (with China) are ticked off, along with a fifth one, Terrifying Weather.
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| Which included a plague of dill pickles on my front lawn last night. |
I'd add my own personal sixth horseman of the apocalypse: Hospital Bill.
I got a call from the hospital billing department yesterday to inform me, very pleasantly, that I owe them more than four thousand bucks from my little visit last February. Now, this was stunning, but more so because I've already paid bills totally close to two grand, including a few hundred for a strange foreign gentleman named (honest!) Zoltan, who came to my bed of pain in the ER to whack me in various spots with a reflex hammer. So I was expecting more billing, but not on this scale.
You just never know when it's over with hospitals.
In my mind, every episode of House would have ended the same way.
"Your brilliance has once again saved another patient, Dr. House! None of us could have known that his Cushing's syndrome was masking his Sjogren's syndrome! But when he got the fifteenth bill he hanged himself in the garage."
"Okay. So what's going on with the fat slob with the creeping crud on his junk?"
Oh, well. I am told that there's a handy interest-free payment plan, so I can go broke over the long run rather than right away. So I got that going for me.
Honestly, I could even take all that on the chin if I only knew for sure that there'd be no more bills. But who knows -- Zoltan might send me an invoice to buy a new hammer.
Maybe I'll send him a nice jar of dill pickles.
I had hernia surgery, paid the copay, later got a bill for another $4K. I thought I would ignore it for a while, but Mrs. PLW who is good at these things scrutinized it for me and determined I was being charged for some out-of-something service that neither I nor my insurance company had preauthorized. Apparently it is technically illegal to add such charge to a bill. After pressing the question with hospital a bit, answer came back pretty quickly "never mind!" This was from one of the biggest hospital systems in the US.
ReplyDeleteMoral of the story - don't trust, and verify.
Good tip, Mr. Woodstock -- I have a feeling Zoltan will be billing me again through the hospital and that will not stand!
ReplyDeleteA friend of ours husband died a while back. We'd stop by to say hey and see if she could use any help, etc.
ReplyDeleteAt her kitchen table she had a pile of paperwork off to one side. Every subsequent visit we found the pile was higher.
I asked her about it. She had been billed by the ambulance (county entity) several times. Similarly other billing at least looked like it was duplicated.
Her husband retired from the Army and so was covered under TRICARE. He also worked for the post office, but I don't remember if he had coverage there.
So, as the pile became higher, we were concerned.
On a later visit, the pile was gone. I asked her what happened and she said she put it all into a paper bag and brought the whole mess to the TRICARE representative, dropped it on his desk, and said he needed to figure it out.
She never got another bill. (I think she scared the heck out of him.)