Zero Balance

And just like that, we are clear. Zero balances from all hospital bills and our name cleared at the collections agency. More accurately: “just like that”. It only took three months of focused effort…

So after the the nighmare call with The CEO and that clusterfuck paymeny process. Finally in a call with the collection agency they confirmed that the third-party billing company notified them that our invoice was sent there by error and that we are not in collections any longer.

Hard to explain in general how hearing that felt, so I’ll stick to a few specifics:

• JM, the person I talked to at the collections agency through these months, finally realized that I’ve been telling the truth all along. In previous calls he tried to politely ask me if it is possible that I am mixing up invoices, maybe I should pay. I am sure he received all kinds of creative attempts from others trying to not pay. I heard in his voice that he realized I was really dealing with something totally messed up. He sounded just as relieved as I must have sounded. This felt good.
• S, the person at the third-party billing company looks like followed up on her promise and helped process the payment (it only took three weeks to process) and reached out to the collection agency to clear things up. This felt good, too.
• CEO, probably will never realize how much of a clusterfuck of an operation he is running. And how wrong and disrespectful he was. I should let this go somehow. I even had a post about that jerk, trying to reach closure. But.. This really keeps bothering me.
• The Process, or more specifically how messed up it is and how seemingly nobody cares enough to get it right blows my mind. There are so many details where it is messed up, not a good process at all. And the United States is considered to be an advanced country, with superior technological advancements over many other countries. Definitely very far from the top when it comes to the healthcare system. This makes me sad and disappointed.
• The Truth, that should always come out, right? I don’t know. Or based on our examples, with other messed up details, one might not be lucky enough to live long enough to see the truth coming out. Or just like in our case: we get our own, mini conclusion, but nobody will use details from our situation to review the processes and make adjustments so others won’t have to spend months to correct things. This makes me furious.
• Exposure, to stupidity and really to the system. Which really doesn’t care about us individuals as we learned. Here is an example: our invoice was sent to the collection agency by error. Should have never even gone there. It took months of my consistent effort talking to so many people to fix it. At the same time, it took three weeks just to process a payment from us. While that payment was still not processed because the process is so messed up, I still asked, why our invoice was still with collections despite it should not have been. I was even told that it won’t be pulled back from collections because I haven’t paid. That is just another layer of clusterfuck on top of clusterfuck. This makes me feel vulnerable.
• The Bigger Picture, looks even worse. This is not made up, I have written proof of everything I say here, but let me just put this out there: this year have I just blindly, trustingly pay whatever healthcare related invoices we received, I would have overpaid by about $1,500. These are based on errors admitted by these various healthcare providers. And it took many-many months to fix them. In the end it was always fixed after a 15 minutes long call with the right person who knew how to solve the problem. Everyone else I talked to for months? Apparently just robots… This makes me angry.

So for now, I’ll just take this as a mini victory and ready for a quiet, heltcare invoice free few weeks. Cheers!