Starting about two years ago, I got an unexpected medical bill in the mail. The amount wasn’t very high, but I was quite frustrated and annoyed. First, this was from a local College of Dentistry, where most procedures are free for the insured (and probably not insured too); there was no “explanation of benefits” that explained this was a co-pay, or that my insurance only covered some portion. Secondly, I hadn’t been to the College of Dentistry in quite a while, so I had no idea which of the various procedures this was or even what day I received the billed service. Third, there was no way to get more information: the absolute worst thing about this provider is that the administrative staff are some of the most overloaded and overworked people I have ever seen, and I have witnessed them just let the phone ring because they’re dealing with a huge line of in-person patients (some of whom are bleeding from their mouth). So I didn’t pay it. After a while though, the bills continued and I started to worry. Was I wasting paper for no reason? Would this harm my credit score? So I put about an hour into finding a way to actually get in touch with the billing office: turns out this was a Google Form buried somewhere on a website, and if you fill it out, a someone calls you (in my case, within the hour!), looks up your chart, and can tell you the date of service and why you were billed. Why they didn’t just include this in the bill in the first place? I have to imagine this makes it ever harder for the College to actually collect on these debts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Starting about two years ago, I got an unexpected medical bill in the mail. The amount wasn’t very high, but I was quite frustrated and annoyed. First, this was from a local College of Dentistry, where most procedures are free for the insured (and probably not insured too); there was no “explanation of benefits” that … Continue reading “Medical bills”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[22,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-politics","category-presentation-of-self","post_format-post-format-aside"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2006"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2006\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2007,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2006\/revisions\/2007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}