The Small Is Beautiful Manifesto

22 August, 2007

HEALTH CARE DEBACLE!

Let me start by saying my blood pressure has to be high right now, due to the fact that I have just been on the phone with over 6 different people the past hour! Why is our health care such a farce? I mean, we pay for health insurance, we go to the doctor when it is necessary, not frivolously, and we expect the insurance, we pay for, to pay for the appropriate contribution. Is this too much to ask for? How about the actual doctor or medical facility's responsibility, shouldn't they bill the insurance company?

I had two services performed at one facility. The first in Jan of this year and the second in March of this year. The second service was billed to my insurance. The first was not billed. Instead of contacting me, they sent that bill directly to a collections agency, that did not notify me of any missed billing until JUNE!!! This was the first time I realized something was messed up.

It seems that the collections agency is not able to bill insurance only the facility of service. The facility is unwilling to bill, because the account doesn't belong to them anymore, it is the collections agency's. I mean what the F*%$#%$#%^!!!!!

Twice I was hung up on already and I still have no resolution. Instead I have to wait for the manager of the billing department to call me back... I have a suspicion that won't happen!

So living in the land of the free, how free are we? How wonderful is our health care? Anyone see SICKO yet? I have not, but did listen to several interviews with Michael Moore and realize that I really and truly like this man's approach and drive. Why is this country so backwards with simple things? Is it because of the almight dollar? We do live in Babylon... watch! It fell.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What a pain in the ass. I was just talking to a friend about this last night. One of the reason's having MD stay in his current position works for us right now is it give me time to negotiate to shift mine and Jamie's health insurance to my job. We had shifted all of us to MD's because we thought that I'd be the one changing jobs in the near future, and now the positions have reversed. This way at least we would only have one person's cobra to pay rather than the entire family. Ugh. Anyway, this friend had seen Sicko and was telling me about it. I definitely plan to see it soon.