My health is absurdly good, so I’ve never had medical insurance billing confusion until recently when part of a routine checkup was originally billed as non-preventative. This meant I had to pay for it. To make a long story sort, after almost a year, numerous phone calls and letters, it now appears it will be billed as preventative, which means the insurance company pays the entire cost.
I had no idea things got this screwed up in medical billing. Sue says it happens all the time. Really, we need a sane system and certainly not the convoluted mess we have now. How much money, time, and effort gets wasted dealing with stuff like this? Enormous amounts, no doubt.
Fortunately, Sue knows how to handle such situations, and calmly made the phone calls, being polite, asking for their help, etc. And I had the sense to let her do it. Going howler monkey on them is counter-productive, makes them less likely to want to help you, and besides, you’re generally just dealing with a administrative person who isn’t the cause of the problem anyway. But they can solve it for you.