Utterly Meaningless

I’m glad you keep putting those stories up.

It’s not just health insurance. it’s also credit cards.

I have health insurance. A pretty good Cigna PPO. Last year, just at this time, I had surgery scheduled to remove my right kidney due to massive infection caused by untreated UTIs from when I did not have health insurance (another story). But I did not, and do not, carry credit cards.

When I went to the hospital for testing and for them to put a drainage tube in to prep me for surgery, I got a big surprise. They asked me for the full deductible up front, plus some for the 20% offset. I panicked. They acted all dismissive and asked me why I couldn’t just put it on my credit card. Well, I said, I haven’t had credit cards for fifteen years, and I have done pretty well without them. I pitched a fit, basically, and got them to come down on their demands to the point where I could write a check. I had to put off some bills and I couldn’t afford the prescriptions that week, but I did it. Fortunately I work in IT, and I had a laptop, and I could dial in from home, so the paychecks were still coming in even though I was more or less housebound.

Then I showed up at the hospital early on the morning of surgery. Even though I had made every effort to make sure I had paid everything I needed to, I got called into a small office and asked for six hundred dollars, which I did not have since I had been paying their upfront fees and charges all along. I could not come up with the money and they would not hold a check until I got paid again. Finally I called my apartment complex and begged them for an extension, and because I am a good tenant they gave me an extra week with no late fee. We wound up having to reschedule the surgery for later in the day, bumping a few less urgent surgeries out of the way. My surgeon was toweringly angry, but not at me… not at all at me.

Incidentally, four days later, while I was still on heavy pain medication, the hospital sent a woman around from Accounting with a piece of paper with an amount of money written on it, which was supposed to be the amount I would have to pay before I could be discharged. Not even an invoice, let alone an itemized bill. I looked at the woman in horror and asked her if, pain medication or no pain medication, she thought I fell off the turnip truck the night before. I told her, reasonably, that I would pay after they sent me an itemized bill that I could go over with my insurance company. They have tried to bill me about ten times, and I just call and ask for the itemized bill. They still haven’t sent it, but they have stopped billing me.