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March 15, 2011

St. Luke's Hospital continues to FUCKING SUCK (, , )

by fluffy at 7:33 PM

I thought I'd had all the bills settled from my endoscopy last year. So of course today I just got another bill from St. Luke's for $713.72 with no reason given aside from "balance due," saying that there is no more insurance payment forthcoming on this account. The only contact option given was either calling their toll-free number or "access your account online." Knowing that the online access is useless I called the number. I was greeted with an endless cavalcade of data entry, which ended with "our office is now closed; please call back during regular business hours." They could have said that BEFORE I spent 5 minutes entering every bit of information they wanted. Ugh.

Meanwhile, I have no idea what this amount could be for. I am pretty sure that I have paid every bill that came to me. All this shows is: Service date June 24 2010 (the endoscopy), total charges $6430.07, $4044.56 in payments, a $-1671.79 "adjustment," and a balance due of $713.72. I am pretty sick of this whole stupid situation.

And of course my employers moved me over to a new insurance provider this year so who knows what the hell the status is of my previous insurance vis-a-vis handling this issue. Obviously my new insurance company wouldn't be held accountable for this.

St. Luke's billing department is the embodiment of failure and a shining example of what is wrong with the American healthcare industry.

Or, in short, St. Luke's hospital FUCKING SUCKS.

Comments

#13820 03/16/2011 01:50 am
Okay, so I just went back through all my insurance paperwork and found that my insurance did say that for this particular thing, they were paying all but $713.72 of it. So it's more my insurance company's crap for not covering the whole freaking thing. But it's stupid of St. Luke's to not bill me until 6 months after this was all supposed to be settled!

So I guess I'm writing a dang ol' check to them.

(And you'd think that with all this they could at least provide prepaid postage on the return envelope... Or a way to pay by credit card that doesn't involve talking to them on the phone.)
#13830 03/20/2011 07:32 am Sorry, I guess I'm going to be *that guy*.
But they charged $6000 for an endoscopy? Did they use some kind of magic unicorn hair probe or something?

Over here, they cost £500 or so. Really sorry to hear you getting messed around by this.
#13831 03/20/2011 11:30 am
Yep, and that was just the endoscopy itself. There were a few thousand in other ancillary costs, all said, and I think my total out-of-pocket expense – EVEN WITH INSURANCE, on a procedure ORDERED BY MY DOCTOR – was over $1000.

oh, and right now I'm having a lot of other fun stuff because I wanted to switch my PCP to a doctor who specializes in gender-variant care, but my employer changed our insurance providers this year, and gave us a choice between a few of them. I went with PacifiCare thinking it was their PPO option (like we had before) but it turns out it's PacifiCare's HMO, which will not cover the specific doctor (who will not work with an HMO because he doesn't want to practice "factory medicine"). He suggested that maybe I can offer to pay extra to get a PPO physician option, but otherwise I'll just have to wait until next year and hope that one of our other cheap-ass insurance options will cover him. Sad

American healthcare is such a stupid, unfunny joke right now.