Billing Departments

It was a good visit. We broached one of the stickier items of major illnesses........the billing departments!

Tess was feeling most anxious about bills that were coming in and confused about no bills, double bills or excessive bills. Insurance was paying some but not what they expected. Jamie did not have time to sort them out and until now, Tess did not have the ability to deal with that part also. I just laughed.

It is so ironic that just when you are too old or too sick or too confused or too tired that hospital billing departments seem to be the most creative at chaos. I assured Tess that this was normal and undoubtedly things were not as they appeared. It seems to be part of the whole process.

In the first half day of sorting, she discovered another person with her name in South Dakota was getting half of the bills, and of course, not paying them. And that another goodly proportion was going to an old insurance company who of course was not paying them. She turned the snippy Cleveland Clinic administrative clerk from a foe to a friend, and her mother (me!) promised to return the following week with another 3-ring notebook, this time devoted to the art of following the labrinth of mysterious hospital billing.

She has about 40 more calls to make today (!) and I probably should have anticipated this and prepared the 3-ring notebook earlier, but hey. Each in its appointed time. Looking back on my last hospital stay, the charts and accounting pages with all the highlights, codes, connecting lines, etc. look like a page from an advanced math class, and my case was a lot less complicated than Tess's.

Maybe it's part of the cure. When your brain has recovered enough to untangle the billing they know you're almost done!