The Insurance Company Gets it Right for Once
I never expected things to work out perfectly with all the insurance issues and medical bills associated with Madeline’s birth, but I didn’t expect as many problems and mistakes as we’ve had. Madeline and I had different insurance for the birth (yes, the baby gets a bill too!) and so we’re dealing with two different insurance companies.
We got hit with a tripple-whammy in about late June or early July. First, the insurance company processed my hospital stay incorrectly, leaving us with a bill about $1500 higher than it should have been. That is definitely an error as far as we can tell. It was supposed to get resolved in 10-15 business days, but it is well past that and no news yet.
We’ve also had issues with Madeline’s insurance. Somewhere between us turning in the paperwork for her insurance (to start with the day of her birth) and the paperwork being processed at the insurance office, the start date got changed from May 21st to June 1st…meaning, right now the insurance company doesn’t think they need to cover any bills associate with her hospital stay or her followup visits to the doctor before June 1st. The ISU insurance office assures us they will get this problem taken care of. But again, no official resolution to this error.
Sandwiched inbetween finding out about these two issues, we got a bill from McFarland Clinic for the Anesthesiologist that did my epidural during the birth. This caused quite a crisis due to a quirk in my insurance that basically means we have to pay a lot more for services from the clinic. It seemed really unfair to me that a service provided to me at the hospital would have to be billed from the clinic. There wasn’t much we could do about it at that point, and so it got submitted to the insurance. We were expecting the worst — that we would have to pay an additional $500 or so on top of what we had been counting on paying for all the medical bills for Madeline’s birth.
We finally got the insurance statement in the mail for that claim. Amazinly enough, even though we got a bill from McFarland, the insurance company paid the Anesthesiologist who performed the work directly, and aparently she herself is a preferred provider because we had no extra charges for her services. Praise God!!!! With the difficult-to-balance budget I blogged about yesterday, this makes a big difference. Things in our budget will look a little brighter.
I’m so thankful for this gift from God — and insurance problem that finally worked out in our favor! I’m still very hopeful that the other two problems will get themselves worked out, because they are so clearly errors that were not of our doing. But please keep praying for us that this will be the case!