The health care nightmare isn't just
a patient's medical needs or the insurance. It is also the stupidity that comes along with the big organizations "consolidating" clinics and hospitals and creating bizarre administrative nightmares for patients. Case in point is my clinic and hospital that is part of a big conglomerate now after a recent takeover.
I used to go for my medical care and they would send me a bill after Medicare etc. did their thing which showed me what I owed. Easy deal one bill one payment. But now that the conglomerate is in control each department that does anything for you sends you a bill with a separate account number for each time they interact with you. If you are in the hospital and the lab is taking blood each day for 7 days you are going to receive 7 different billings each with their own account number. The doctor has his services billed the same way with a number different from all other departments. Likewise any department in the hospital. In other words if you were in for a couple of intense weeks and then went home the following month would likely bring dozens and dozens of envelopes to your mailbox with each one having your name and a different account number.
One might ask why, trust me I did, but all anybody could say is "That's just how we do it." Can you imagine what happens to someone having a "foggy" time of things and being in and out of the hospital off and on for several months? How on earth could you ever keep track? They do not send you a "consolidated" bill for example every 30 days. You just get these individual billings but they are all from the same company.
Each bill that comes is multiple pages even though the details are on the front of the first page. The other pages are about their "commitment" to caring about me etc. But nowhere in the pages of "talk" does it explain this bizarre approach of having all these different account numbers instead of a patient having just one account number as before. So if you called in to make a payment using one bill and the account number on that bill the system does not tell you your whole balance it only responds to that particular procedure or service. So you might think you paid your bill but you only paid a part of what you really owe. Then imagine getting billed for a lab charge for example that seems like you already paid your bill. Well you did but that was for a different day. The point here being they took a simple system and made it complicated. Nobody advises the patients ahead of time about the crazy system and as I said there is no explanation or "Caution: Please be advised...." etc. in the billing. If you talk to a live rep to make a payment they ask you for your account number and tell what the bill is for the number you gave and process that payment accordingly. They don't say "Would you like information on your other account numbers?"
So how in the world could someone with many health issues and lots of "in and out time" at a hospital and frequent doctor's visits keep all of this straight? Maybe the reason is that creating blizzards of account numbers and charges allows the facility owners to over-bill Medicare because in the example I cited a patient like that is going to generate hundreds and thousands of billings and who could possibly keep track to make sure that duplicate "account numbers" haven't been "mistakenly" billed to Medicare?
This is insanity.
= new reply since forum marked as read
