Billing mistakes happen! If your insurance carrier denies a claim or cannot evaluate a charge, DO NOT pay the balance. Question the bill.

After a car accident put me in the hospital for 24 hours with a knee joint puncture, I got a bill for $14,999. That was just for emergency, surgery center costs, and my overnight stay. All the doctors I saw and the ambulance services were billed separately. Then insurance evaluated it.

That $15k bill ended up being around $2K in actual approved expense. Two thousand could not be evaluated by my insurance carrier and the hospital could never tell me what it was. I ultimately wrote them a letter stating if my insurance company could not evaluate it, I was not paying it. I used that letter several times over several years after the hospital sold the debt to debt collection. Every time I sent the letter the collector agreed I did not owe. It stopped the calls from them, it did not stop them selling the debt to another collection agency. This happened 3 times. It never appeared on my credit report as a debt.

My husband recently got a bill for $7,000 for new hearing aids. We have hit our deductible this year. The cost should have been $0. Fortunately we have a representative at the insurance company who was great. She worked directly with the doctors office and sorted it out with limited time required from us.

Mistakes happen! As a cancer patient we have even more opportunities for mistakes than your average human. Keep good records and question when things look wonky!

Have you experienced this?

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