UPDATE: Billing issue with hospital, need advice

[ashfern]

This might be slightly incoherent as I am royally ticked off right now. Long story short, I had a fall while roller skating Sept 2018, went to ER for treatment, & ended up with surgery to have a plate put in my wrist. Issue is with the ER hospital. We set up a payment plan and made all of the payments (first payment $400+ at time of visit and last payment in Sept/Oct 2019). In the middle of the payments we moved but didn't change our address with the hospital as we were making the payments and everything was fine, on our end. Feb 2020 I get a call from the hospital billing that there is a balance due. We call and they claim we still owe $600+. We tell them to send a bill and if we owe it we will pay it but are confused as we made all of the payments. Give them our new address. We ended up giving them our address 3 times before they finally get it verbally correct. Now I get collection calls, while dealing with hospital billing department. I am dealing with one person in particular at hospital billing, G. He tells me that he will review the file and get back to me within a couple of days. He calls back that afternoon and says that they will accept what we have paid as payment in full but he has to have a supervisor approve it. That was in April. I still get the automated calls from the hospital billing telling me to call in. Every person I talk to can see that what G told me is in there and is still pending. Beginning of July, I get a collection call again. I call hospital billing and ask for a supervisor. She transfers me, gives me the name & phone #, and tells me they have 72 hours to respond. I leave a message on July 13th, July 21st, & again today July 30th. I got another call from collections today. I called them back & told them that I am still waiting for any documentation from the hospital that I requested starting in Feb and have asked for no less than 6 times. DH tells her that we will not be paying the collection company anything and she hangs up. I call G again. He now says it is out of what he can do and will email his supervisor, again has 48 hours to get back to us. He did give me the name of his direct supervisor which is not the person I have left the message with. Now he tells us that he cannot send me an itemized statement even though in the past he was supposed to send it. So what would y'all advise next?

[TechWife]

Look on the hospital website for the name of the CEO and call his office. At this point you need to go straight to the top. You also need to request a zero balance bill and written  proof they have pulled your account back from collections. 

[TravelingChris]

6 minutes ago, TechWife said:

Look on the hospital website for the name of the CEO and call his office. At this point you need to go straight to the top. You also need to request a zero balance bill and written  proof they have pulled your account back from collections. 

Exactly.  And if for some reason you are having problems with this, get local news channels involved. If you don't live in someplace like NYC but in a more reasonably sized city or area for that kind of stor).  We were always seeing stories relating awful customer service in most areas that we lived in which had more than half a million viewership and getting the media to be on your side is a valuable assett. 

Another tactic is using Twitter to complain about the hospital's inaction but again I would follow TechWife's suggestion first.  BUt if no go, twitter with hashtags for the Hospital and the CEO and you probably will get action.

[ashfern]

I ended up posting to twitter on Friday and got a phone call today. This is what I learned. Somehow I was entered as self-pay even though they had my insurance information. We did receive a refund from them in Jan 2019, which was because of my self-pay status. That was later reversed in June 2019 due to an "error". That is the $639 that I owed. The woman I spoke to today said that she doesn't know why nobody ever explained this to me (probably because it's super confusing). Going forward she is going to put me in as self-pay, cancel the claim with my insurance company (ER visit from Sept 2018), and determined that they actually owe me an additional $278. She is going to get everything all settled and will call back to let me know when they send out the check. It is still super confusing. I did tag a reporter from the AJC as this is one of the big non-profit hospitals in the area. I let her know what I found out today. Hopefully, this is the final resolution to this situation.