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I just saved $1000 sort of...

February 5th, 2008 at 03:02 am

Well I like to think I saved $1K. I got one of the many medical bills that are starting to show up for my DH. My DH had surgery in December for cancer and as of last week he just started Chemo. He has a type of cancer with a 95% success rate, and he only has to go through chemo for 3 months, so in that aspect we are lucky and we believe everything will be fine once he is done with chemo. So on to the medical bills - his insurance lets me track all the bills submitted and how much they pay to the hospitals/doctors/etc, and what we will have to pay. Well I received one bill today from the hospital and it showed the total due was $1503. So I pull up my spreadsheet which has is 15 different bills listed and totals, and I notice on this one my insurance says we only owe $537 total. Why does my bill show $1503? So I call to try and figure this out and get some lame excuse about they don't have the final numbers from the insurance, etc. Then why did I get a bill? Something about our system will update again and you'll get a revised bill, just throw this one away they tell me. Huh? Why even send it out? They have no answer for me really. BUT... if I was not as organized, tracking every single bill and the amount we actually should have to pay, what if I would have paid this bill? Because looking at this bill it looks like the insurance amount WAS applied and the remaining amount was my balance. So if I paid this do you think they would have said anything later on and gave me a credit? Somehow I don't think so. So I could have just saved us $1000 by checking every bill and making sure we really do owe the money.

Honestly could we make the medical billing/paying/insurance ANY more difficult??

Well - on to my spending today - $36.50 for gas - that was it! Bills will be coming in soon but for today that was it.