We have all grown accustom to getting the hideous things in the mail, but whenever I am home and I hear the footsteps on my front porch and the metal lid of my mailbox slamming shut it still curdles my milk.
I had the unfortunate experience of being involved in an accident back in October while I was driving back to work from the hospital where I had paid on a bill I had there. I stopped at a stop sign, proceeded because I thought it was clear, but hey – that’s why they call them accidents, right?
Anyway, I apparently blacked out briefly and when I came to there was a whole host of people standing around my car, asking me my name, the president’s name, what two times six was, to recite the alphabet, you name it. I counted two fire trucks, an ambulance, and four squad cars! My first reaction was “my God-How much is THIS going to cost me now”? Not, “Do I have a detached retina, or will I suffer any brain damage or blindness”, etc…
They kept telling me to go back to the hospital and get an X-ray or whatever, and I said “NO”! I had just come from the evil place before the accident where
I had finished paying off one Hell of a bill for having my tail removed (see opinion archives), and the last thing I wanted to do was go back and have an X-ray taken at an institution that is notorious for etching the concept of the $5.00 cotton ball into the American psyche.
This brings me to an interesting side note, and the communist in me is going to start showing itself – I don’t claim to be one, but it doesn’t take long when I complain about the state of the medical system now days for some ex-Marine or CEO to start lambasting me, calling me a “liberal” or “communist” or “idiot”. I just don’t know what the Hell these people are talking about when they say that we have the best healthcare system in the world. I have Blue Cross too! I am old enough to remember real insurance where you paid the dues every paycheck and then that covered things like, oh… your healthcare! Now you pay very check and then pay up to two grand out of your pocket and then pay more and more for whatever. They even start making things up – I swear to God they do this.
Case in point-back to the accident. My car insurance representative assured me that I was covered to the gills in benefits, and that I should at least go get an X-ray and have my head scanned. So I went down to the hospital and spent a whole forty minutes standing in front of this thing until the guy was finished taking these picures.
So then the bills start rolling in. I call the hospital and the radiologists’ offices to inform them that my auto insurance is paying for all of this (all being the X-ray and a CAT-scan of my head). I then discovered that I had to send the bills to my auto insurance rep. Did that -then the bills come again. I tell these people over and over that the car insurance is covering this single visit, and I proceed to fax copies of these bills to my insurance agent’s office.
Finally, the other shoe drops – I got a collection agency’s letter telling me the radiologists are tired of waiting on MY payment. I call them in a huff and inform them that this is covered by my auto insurance, so they tell me to disregard the collection letter. Then another comes a week later!
Long story short- I am still, to this day, waiting for this issue to get rectified, AND, on top of that, I got another bill yesterday stating that my previous balance of $129.00 had been upped to $820.00! If I had known that this would lead to such a horrible state of affairs I never would have set foot in that hospital in the first place. So let this be a lesson in trusting your intuition.
Now the irony – The cherry on the sundae, so to speak. The fat lady’s last appearance on the opera’s stage (although, after watching Renee Fleming on PBS, I can say that fat soprano stereotype is just that): I also, to this day, have never once heard from the hospital or radiology department regarding the RESULTS of the X-rays or CAT-scan! For all I know, I could have some sort of hemorrhage or detachment, or a ticking time-bomb affliction in my head somewhere. The only time I was contacted by these entities after my brief visit to the hospital, was the “friendly reminder” that I need to pay my balance in full.
Okay – gotta go check the mail.