sign of apocalypse

today my schedule said: "Manage medical bills." (It does not say 'pay medical bills', because mostly what I do is manage them rather than pay them. I send certified letters to the billing agencies explaining why I don't owe them what they think I owe them, and try to reconcile insurance explanation of benefits with hospital bills. Sometimes, with enormous gratitude, I get to actually write a small check for an amount that I think is correct and seems not unreasonable to me, staple a bunch of duplicate bills and EOBs together, and file them away. But mostly I just shake my head at the idiocy of it all, and wait for the next month's round of bills to see if the billing agency has actually bothered to read the certified letter it signed for to see why I'm not paying their bill. Sometimes I send certified letters to collections agencies to tell them why the debt they bought is not legit. I use fancy-sounding legal language like "Pursuant to Federal Law 95-109, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, I am notifying your office in writing that I dispute the validity of the debts you reference in your letter of ....". I follow up the scary legalese with a suggestion that they "revisit" the issue of the debt with the hospital or medical office in question.



I have hopes that one day soon, after last year's round of pregnancy bills go through, I will not require a whole item on my schedule devoted to "manage medical bills," but just be able to pay a bill during my normal bill-paying time.



Anyway, about the sign of the apocalypse. Two years ago, I had a pap smear. Yes, I have them every year. The one I had in May 2005 was billed to an insurer I was no longer with at the time of the smear. For two years now, my GP's billing service has been dutifully billing me for this pap smear, every single month. Some months I have ignored the bill. Some months I send it back with a form letter I've devised that provides all my insurance information (current and previous ) on it and politely requests that they bill it. In November, I broke down and went the certified letter route. In December, January, and February, I continued to receive bills for the ancient pap smear.



Today I opened up the March bill and found that on February 28th, they billed the insurance company for the pap smear. They even, I gather, billed the correct insurance company for it, because the company paid.* Hence, my feeling that the apocalypse must be coming soon.



Now if I can get the very same billing agency to deal with the certified letter I sent on Max's behalf, complaining about the $60 check they cashed but didn't credit, and their insistence that in January 2006 we were not covered by insurance, when we most certainly were, then I will really start stocking up on the canned goods.



*Though I still have the vague sensation that the amount the insurance company paid was not all that it should have been, because I still feel that the "patient responsibility" was rather high for a pap smear, which is neither an expensive nor elective procedure, and certainly far cheaper than metastatic cervical cancer....