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It's not even just insurance companies. My wife and I had a child earlier this year, uncomplicated natural birth, fully covered under insurance. However the hospital initially filed the claim incorrectly, causing the claim to be denied and us to receive a bill in the thousands well in excess of our deductible/coinsurance. Hours of phone calls to insurance and hospital later, we think we have it resolved but are informed it may take up to 6 weeks to process. Fine, we wait six weeks. Hospital starts threatening to send us to collections for non-payment. Hours of phone calls later it turns out they were waiting on information from insurance that they never received. So six phone calls later we think we've gotten it all sorted out. This time people actually follow through, hospital switches our payment to pending and that's the last we heard of it. Got confirmation that insurance paid out several months later. Again, the hospital messed up the paperwork, but the burden of solving the problem falls on us, with serious financial consequences if we don't. While we're dealing with a newborn no less. There should really be a law that makes institutions liable for such errors. Also insurance was a little shady as well. The amount of the outstanding bill should have pushed us over our out-of-pocket-max for the year, but when they finally paid out they marked it as an "adjustment". Which means we're still in the coinsurance part of plan. So we're getting deeply discounted healthcare for the rest of the year, but not free. It's not worth the time for us to run down, and maybe they're doing everything in line with the fine print, but it definitely smells rotten. |