Fun with Medical Bills

[marydell]

Today was pay-the-goddamn-medical-bills-wouldya? day in the Dell household.  Normally I either pay in the doctor's office or, uh, wait for a nice customer care representative to call me and say "wouldya pay the goddamn bill already?" and then I give them the debit card number over the phone. Apparently there are these things called postage stamps? But I don't generally go in for those. Efficiency, thy name is something other than Mary.  Really it's the medical people's fault; since I don't have to pay until after insurance has paid their bit, the billing people are ridiculously patient and mostly don't bother me for a very long time.  They are to blame for my laxity!

Anyway, I recently triaged the bill pile and cleared out everything that was already paid or a duplicate. Today I went through and first tried to pay everything that had an online bill pay option.  One of the bills from someone not-patient was referred to a collection agency recovery service, and when I went to the website shown on that bill it said "Network Solutions! Would you like to buy this domain?" thaaaats a good sign.  My main medical provider, the hospital around the corner, has a nice online pay site, but every time you go for any service they generate a new account number.  They've managed to associate about 50% of Charlie's PT appointments to one login, and all the other ones are sort of off in the ether, requiring me to guess whether I've already paid or not and then enter what I want to apply to that particular account.  All together, it's about $140 worth of separate $20 copays. Bleah. If they would, oh I dunno, ask for the copay when we are actually there in the office that would save me a lot of typing of meaningless 1-time account numbers.  I know, next I'll be wanting a bank teller to do things for me (oh, wait, I actually have a bank where tellers do things for me! This week, anyway; they're having another merger.  But I digress).

Then I went and set up payees in my online bill pay at my bank for everyone else.  Take Care Health Systems, Sub Ped Pulmonology, Consultants in Cardiology, Tooth Studio, Serendestiny Enterprises, Radiology & Nuclear Consultants, Children's Surgical Foundation, Midwest Pediatric Cardiology, Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.  Goddamn I am fortunate to have good health insurance.  It's not simply that I couldn't pay these without health insurance--I absolutely could not, but that wouldn't matter because most of these doctors would not be available to my family at all, if I didn't have insurance.

When bills pile up and many of them are just $20 copays (with an occasional "ear wax removal--$320" thrown in for fun), it's easy to just pay 'em without stopping to figure out who they're from or when we had the service in question (2009 was a busy year that way). But one name caught my eye--Serendestiny Enterprises.  The invoice just had the copay and not much to identify which doctor it was for.  A little googling found it tho--it's for Charlie's geneticist. Serenity, Destiny. That's either awesome or creepy, I haven't decided yet.

ETA:  Today I paid a couple of the bills by phone so I could use my medical-account credit card thingy from work (it's a flexpay account, where I put money in pre-tax and have to use it for current-year med bills or lose it).  The RIC took my info and then said "and since you're paying by phone, I can give you a 15% discount." HUH? People, if you reward my laziness I'll never learn. And since when do hospitals give random and weirdly big discounts? It's not like the RIC has much competition luring customers away from them.  Very strange but I'll take it.

Comments

[carbonel]

I would assume that "Serendestiny" is a conflation of "serendipity" and "destiny" -- no serenity.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I figure serenity because she's working with genetic defects (or testing to determine the absence of same) and trying to improve outcomes. Serendipity would fit if mutations had positive effects, but not so much for negative ones, I think.