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skooma512 posted:"So I called them and she said it's hospital protocol even if you're just walking in and you're not seen. When you type in your social, that's it. You're going to get charged regardless," she said. 
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Nov 2, 2021 01:17
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| # ? May 5, 2024 00:34 |
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Nov 2, 2021 18:52
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A few years ago, my parents got a hospital bill for roughly $20 with my name on it. I hadn't lived with my parents for a long time and I'd never been to this hospital or lived in the region that this hospital was in. No big deal, it's a mistake, right? I call the hospital and they tell me just to pay it. They say I had an EKG read by some doctor (I've never had an EKG) there and therefore I need to pay. I even try to request a copy of the EKG report hoping to file a HIPPA violation on them. They are like, "oh, so you did get an EKG", but then can't find the report to send me. After calling a few different people at the hospital and talking for several hours, I finally convince someone that it's a mistake and they say they'll look into it. I hear nothing back after a week, so I call and they say that they agree it's a mistake and will fix it soon. They'll call when it's taken care of. A month later I call back and the person gets upset with me that I'm not being patient and tells me that it's taken care of. Six months later I get a collections notice. I call, they don't believe me that I didn't actually receive treatment until they read my account notes and then tell me that the removal of the charge never got processed and that they'll take care of it. I dispute the collections notice anyways and they drop it. I call the hospital back and ask for confirmation of the charge being removed and they refuse to send me any sort of confirmation that the charge was dropped because they aren't allowed to send information to people who aren't customers of the hospital. Somehow that was more frustrating and stressful than the time I made the mistake of getting routine STI testing at my annual physical (required to keep my insurance premium low) instead of paying cash at the health department or Planned Parenthood, a mistake which cost me about $900 in lab fees.
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Nov 2, 2021 21:55
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I'm working through the thread, but is there a solid resource somewhere for dealing with medical bills/debt? I'm also working through the debt collector thread in BFC (https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3234974) but that seems more like dealing with later stage debt collectors (and sacrificing your credit in the process). I burned the bottom of my foot two months ago and was transferred from one ER to another hospital across town, about a 20min ride. They didn't do anything besides wheel me in/out and check my vitals maybe once, for ~$4k. Insurance covered like 20% but I don't know how I'm going to pay remainder. I literally should have just told the first ER to roll my rear end out to the curb so I could call an Uber. Would have made no difference, I was completely stable, etc., and would've cost like 20 bucks instead
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Nov 23, 2021 15:13
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Mr. Pizza posted:I'm working through the thread, but is there a solid resource somewhere for dealing with medical bills/debt? I'm also working through the debt collector thread in BFC (https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3234974) but that seems more like dealing with later stage debt collectors (and sacrificing your credit in the process). if you're in the US all hospitals should have "sliding scale", where they forgive part/all of the remaining balance depending on what your income is look on the hospital's website for a financial assistance option - you might have to send in documentation of income and jump through some hoops
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Nov 23, 2021 15:49
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I got a bill for $185 from a teledoc I got off ZocDoc. He's already gotten $650 out of Blue Cross in his state and $50 off me for a co-pay. It was literally a 5-minute Zoom for an ear infection that resulted in a generic antibiotics script. This dude's running some big-time insurance scam right? He's listed as like 3 different states on ZocDoc and his insurance list is Blue Cross of Every Single State.
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Dec 21, 2021 23:11
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PostNouveau posted:I got a bill for $185 from a teledoc I got off ZocDoc. He's already gotten $650 out of Blue Cross in his state and $50 off me for a co-pay. It was literally a 5-minute Zoom for an ear infection that resulted in a generic antibiotics script. is he out-of-network on your plan
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Dec 21, 2021 23:13
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McNugget Buddy posted:is he out-of-network on your plan He's in another state but accepts my state's plan. The Blue Cross/Blue Shield in his state paid him, not my state's
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Dec 21, 2021 23:14
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just dont pay it. thats what I do.
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Dec 22, 2021 02:46
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https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2021.01130 Hospital Lawsuits Over Unpaid Bills Increased By 37 Percent In Wisconsin From 2001 To 2018 Abstract We analyzed Wisconsin court records from the period 200118 to document trends in hospital lawsuits to recover patients unpaid medical bills. These lawsuits increased 37 percent during this period, from 1.12 per 1,000 residents in 2001 to 1.53 per 1,000 residents in 2018, with lawsuits being disproportionately directed at Black patients and patients living in poorer and less densely populated counties.
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Jan 4, 2022 19:19
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https://twitter.com/JoshuaPotash/status/1483825942501994497?s=20
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Jan 20, 2022 02:22
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https://twitter.com/denise_dewald/status/1484296948525981698
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Jan 21, 2022 00:35
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there's a new trend here where a restaurant owner will start a gofundme for an employee that needs surgery or has some other health problem because they don't have insurance but no one calls out the restaurant owner or the service industry standards???????
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Jan 24, 2022 18:11
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https://twitter.com/ShikhaJainMD/status/1549778149390422016?s=20&t=A_96DAe5A8dYwHzibCSYhg
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Jul 21, 2022 21:35
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I'm gonna use this as a generalized healthcare thread because I'm not sure where else to put this: So you know how there have been a lot of alzheimer's drugs approved recently even though they didn't seem to cure alzheimers in their human trials? Well it turns out that the entire amyloid plaque theory might have been an intentional scam and those drugs don't do anything. https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease
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Jul 24, 2022 08:14
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30.5 Days posted:I'm gonna use this as a generalized healthcare thread because I'm not sure where else to put this:
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Jul 24, 2022 14:04
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I don't think there was a guy who intentionally fabricated data in favor of chemo or whatever though
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Jul 24, 2022 20:23
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30.5 Days posted:I don't think there was a guy who intentionally fabricated data in favor of chemo or whatever though I was cynically thinking "we're not really that much progressed beyond leeches", and yo, fun fact, leeches might well be more effective than chemo for reducing cancer regrowth.
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Jul 24, 2022 20:48
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My insurance decided to use CVS Caremark to administer prescriptions. This was never told to me and I just get charged 40 dollars more for adderall out of nowhere last November. I do not have one single email explaining this occured. I called my insurer, and they told me to call my insurer. No seriously he did, but Rx is done by it's own administration company who unilaterally decide all these things. I was looking through the plan info, and my Rx admin isn't CVS Caremark, it's Navitus? So basically I have to go to CVS for insurance to not gouge me because they make more money that way. This was never explained to me in any way and I had to go digging to figure it out. Next year, I'm sure there will be another set of middlemen shuffled in that I have to then figure out how to deal with and have to accommodate their rent-seeking scheme. So the middleman insurer hired a second middleman to administer Rx with no choice or information given to me, which I'm told is the hallmark of the American system, and the insurer and my company both give me conflicting accounts as to who exactly is the Rx administrator. Both call centers are now closed. If that ain't the most American poo poo ever.
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Jul 30, 2022 01:33
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skooma512 posted:My insurance decided to use CVS Caremark to administer prescriptions. This was never told to me and I just get charged 40 dollars more for adderall out of nowhere last November. I do not have one single email explaining this occured. I called my insurer, and they told me to call my insurer. No seriously he did, but Rx is done by it's own administration company who unilaterally decide all these things. I was looking through the plan info, and my Rx admin isn't CVS Caremark, it's Navitus? Is your insurer Aetna?
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Jul 30, 2022 01:36
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Pittsburgh Fentanyl Cloud posted:Is your insurer Aetna? Anthem Blue Cross.
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Jul 30, 2022 01:37
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skooma512 posted:My insurance decided to use CVS Caremark to administer prescriptions. This was never told to me and I just get charged 40 dollars more for adderall out of nowhere last November. I do not have one single email explaining this occured. I called my insurer, and they told me to call my insurer. No seriously he did, but Rx is done by it's own administration company who unilaterally decide all these things. I was looking through the plan info, and my Rx admin isn't CVS Caremark, it's Navitus? this happened with us a year or two ago and also cvs wants all meds prescribed for 90 days or they'll give you a ton of hassle, which is a lot of fun when you're adjusting your meds
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Jul 30, 2022 01:40
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skooma512 posted:Anthem Blue Cross. Not sure why they're partnering with CVS since Anthem is Elevance Health and CVS is owned by Aetna, who knows.
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Jul 30, 2022 01:41
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Pittsburgh Fentanyl Cloud posted:Not sure why they're partnering with CVS since Anthem is Elevance Health and CVS is owned by Aetna, who knows. Muh muh muh my payola. Although that's what I mean. The Anthem rep said CVS, one part of my company's benefit site says CVS, but another part of the site with the actual agreement and formulary says it's Navitus, whoever the gently caress they are.  Just another day in American healthcare, brought to you by Franz Kafka.
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Jul 30, 2022 01:44
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Navitus is owned by Costco, bizarrely enough
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Jul 30, 2022 01:47
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also the cvs website is just farcically bad it's like it went through three or four iterations with different business goals and navigation menus and they left chunks of every single one of them running, so every time you want to check on your meds it's trying to get you to order, like, overpriced convenience store items online as if anybody ever had any goddamn desire to do that, and the actual pharmacy part works like it has taken a loving hammer to its metaphorical face and is stumbling around in a daze this week i got a text message saying i have a mail delivery refill available so i logged in to cvs.com, but the website seemed geared to make me pick it up now, and i just absolutely could not find any way it would let me tell them to mail it like they have before so i carefully typed the link from the text message into my browser, and that worked, and now it's in the mail apparently
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Jul 30, 2022 02:07
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never give cvs pharm your phone number for text updates or whatever. I did years ago and they just constantly message you with annoying bullshit, like "make sure your med is ready by turning script on auto refill, REPLY Y or N" but multiplied by how many scripts you have. seriously like 10 texts per week kind of bullshit
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Jul 30, 2022 16:22
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I like how every time my wife visits a certain doctor, the insurance company sends us a subrogation form asking "was this treatment the result of a workplace injury?". She goes there every month. Every month a letter gets printed and put in an envelope and put in the mail where it gets sorted and shipped across the country and then sorted again and then a mail person physically carries the mail to our building and puts it in our letterbox and then I take the letter upstairs and open it and check the box saying "no, this was not a workplace injury" and put it in the business reply envelope and bring it downstairs and put it in the mailbox where a mail person picks it up etc and then I assume a person opens the reply and sees the checked "no" box and throws it in the trash. multiply this effort by millions of people, all to figure out the "right" entity to pay for treatment that already happened. truly the most efficient system in the world
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Aug 14, 2022 17:15
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Illusive gently caress Man posted:sends us a subrogation form could be a policy requirement, preserving subro rights is a requirement on the property /marine side. a big part of the problem with health insurance is that insurance starts from marine, insuring ships and cargo in transit and then evoles into the other types over time. a lot of the bullshit comes from that.
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Aug 14, 2022 17:29
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Illusive gently caress Man posted:I like how every time my wife visits a certain doctor, the insurance company sends us a subrogation form asking "was this treatment the result of a workplace injury?". She goes there every month. I assume they're just hoping for the time it gets lost in the mail, or you're on an extended vacation when it arrives, or you're startled at the moment of carrying in the mail and it slips behind the desk without your notice, etc. They probably have a pretty good return on denied care with this method. With prices how they are, even succeeding 1% of the time is probably enough to cover all of that admin & mail cost, and I bet they succeed at a much higher rate than that.
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Aug 14, 2022 17:35
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https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1559608256820940800?s=20&t=qsfGyR97jRS9dOnpM0dWCQ
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Aug 16, 2022 21:20
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for chemo i had to get bloodwork done a couple days before each infusion so that they could make sure that they weren't poisoning me to death too quickly after the year rolled over my $20 copay suddenly wasn't enough so i got to spend half of this year paying $120 to the lab every other week just one tiny part of cancer treatment lol
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Aug 19, 2022 17:57
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roomforthetuna posted:This seems to be most of medicine unfortunately. Like if you have joint pain everyone knows you should chow down on some glucosamine/chondroitin (google joint pain and that'll for sure be in the top results) but clinical studies have never shown significance, which, given the direction of bias such studies would have, means it definitely doesn't help at all. Chemo and radiation treatments for cancer beyond the surgery are *barely* more effective than placebo and make you so sick in other ways that I'd be pretty surprised if a well-informed patient would choose to have the treatment, but nobody bothers well-informing patients. (Random supporting article from googling "how effective is chemo", "Olaussen and colleagues analyzed data from a very large clinical trial looking at whether post-surgery chemo improved survival for non-small-cell lung cancer patients. It did -- but only by about 4%.") what my extremely standard chemo regimen for one of the most common cancers (bowel cancer, it's like #3 or #2) brought my 5 year survival odds from below 50% (iirc it was ~33%) to above 85%, and that's just FOLFOX, the old "tried and true" treatment they've been using for awhile now also lol those drugs are still so, so expensive that they wouldn't even begin compounding them for each infusion until i checked in and they got an iv in me. took around an hour or so each time, just waiting. something like $10k a pop, every other week lol
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Aug 19, 2022 18:05
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Well as a change of pace, I've got a healthcare success story to share:
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Aug 20, 2022 01:22
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Woodsy Owl posted:Well as a change of pace, I've got a healthcare success story to share:
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Aug 20, 2022 01:55
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my health insurance makes sure it is cheap to get a vasectomy presumably because this single service is much less money than theoretically having to cover a child dependent. thank you insurance
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Aug 21, 2022 02:02
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every ~10 weeks i hafta go in and get my no idea what that cost, no idea when i'll get the lol it's connected to my heart
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Aug 21, 2022 09:03
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we're not losing the house or anything btw, you know how when you know a guy that works for the cable company he always has all the fancy movie channels? that's because they know he'll probably be able to get hooked up even if he's just some office nerd there, so they offer it as an employment benefit instead of just letting it fall of the back of the cable truck well, my wife's a unionized hospital doctor so we have about as good insurance as you can expect from a wealthy blue state. plenty of healthcare still falls off the back of the uh hospital though lol
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Aug 21, 2022 09:19
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I am a health insurance shill and I'm telling on you
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Aug 21, 2022 21:20
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| # ? May 5, 2024 00:34 |
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Went to the Anthem site to see who my pharmacy benefit manager is this month. "Your prescription benefits are maintained by a different pharmacy provider. Please contact that provider for your pharmacy benefits." Who's the provider? No information, not even a field that's missing, they have no intention of showing it.ETA: Found the info and called the PBM and they were actually surprised that they were charging this, and furthermore, not getting a cut. The matter was referred to the "special investigation unit"  so they could ask what the hell their problem is. This makes sense because they added this bonus charge in November, but the PBM changed on Jan 1 like everything else, so it couldn't have been them telling them to do this and my plan couldn't have changed, beyond the thread title anyway. I don't expect to hear from them again, or get my money back as CS person indicated, but they weren't getting a taste of the money so I imagine they're more motivated than usual. skooma512 has issued a correction as of 23:49 on Sep 23, 2022 |
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Sep 23, 2022 23:19
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