So, I’ve been spending Black Friday Buy Nothing Day drafting a letter and going through a mountain of paperwork to submit an appeal to our health insurer.
Wednesday, I got a call from a hospital where my wife had a couple of surgeries earlier this year, apologetically demanding payment for the first of those surgeries after confirming that our health insurer was denying the claim.
The procedure in question was a mandatory prerequisite for the much more expensive second procedure, which was deemed to be a covered procedure, and for which all hospital accounts have been settled.
While I’ll give our health insurer credit for having a snazzy website that (despite it not liking Firefox) has a lot of information and the necessary forms very easy to access…there are a few features lacking (e.g., just try to identify a claim number for a particular claim), and the entire history is messy and rather inconsistent (e.g., multiple claim records and claim numbers for the same procedure).
The whole mess is enough to make an actuary understand the appeal of becoming a consumer advocate.
There’s got to be a better way to handle this “fun”.
