I have insurance, so this seemed like a lot for a colonoscopy and an office visit. When I called, word salad but no satisfactory resolution. I asked whether it was common to pay about $300 out of pocket for a common, recommended cancer screening. He did not have an opinion about that. Next, I proceeded to appropriate a Jim Gaffigan joke, word-smithed to fit the situation: "I would never have consented to be violated in that fashion if I knew it was also going to cost me $300.” Total effing silence. Evidently not a Gaffigan fan. Maybe it was my delivery.
We'd had enough of each other, so I called the insurance company for another twenty minutes of elevator music before a really helpful person came on the line. "It's common to receive two claims, one for a 'facilities charge' and the other for the practitioner's service," she explained. "In the case of your colonoscopy, we received a claim for the facilities charge, which we paid, but we never received a claim for the actual doctor bill. If we received such a claim, of course we'd cover it. Similarly with the office visit. No claim received for the doctor bill." Armed with this information, I placed another call to 1-888-313-1492. Just my luck to talk to the same guy again! He still had dementia and ended up advising me to "contact the individual provider to straighten this out." I thought that's the activity I was currently engaged in! I guess it's my job to get different parts of their organization to communicate with each other so that I don't take it in the ass again?
I reverted to a tactic that has sometimes worked for me in the past. I ignored the problem and hoped it would disappear. After a couple of weeks, I got an email from them. The new strategy had failed. I still owed the above impossible amount. In the interim, I had heard a story on NPR in which it was reported that, in America, it's rare to receive a medical bill that is both comprehensible and accurate. The former deficiency makes it hard to detect the latter deficiency. If consumers suspect something is wrong, they're almost certainly right. Yes, I had thought, but you need a sequel concerning the challenges consumers face when trying to explain to the submitter of the bill the errors in said bill. Anyway, yesterday I placed another call to 1-888-313-1492. It seems only this one guy works there! The sound of his voice reminded me of what a judge said about pornography*: beforehand, I would not have been able to describe it, but soon as I heard it I knew it was him. We started over. He talks with more people than I do and most likely only I realized we'd had the pleasure of being previously acquainted. I explained again my theory of the case, the "facilities charge" but not the "practitioner's charge," blah, blah, and this time, like a gift from above, he replied, "Ah, yes, I see what you mean, I will put those claims through and get this taken care of for you."
Possibly our first and second conversations occurred on his first day of flying solo on his new job? I feel like I made about $450 on one phone call and am wondering what to blow it on. I've heard of the sunk-cost fallacy, and that doesn't seem to apply, so maybe I do deserve about 30 boxes of cheap wine. Here's the thing about the cheap stuff: its alcohol content is the same. The end of this Public Service Announcement but here's Gaffigan:
* “I can’t define ‘pornography,’ but I know it when I see it.”
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