Welcome to the Billing Department from Hell

The best thing about having my own blog is that I can write about life’s little nightmares, then send them off into cyberspace. I get a catharsis, and you, dear readers, get insight and information. I get to exorcise these toxins du jour by sharing them with you. You get to read about them and reflect. What a win-win way for us to deal with modern -- though sometimes hellish -- life.

And yet, these everyday woes and worries are continually dismissed with trite adages because they seem so...so insignificant. So trivial. So small.

Personally, I’m fed up with, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” Not only is small stuff THE stuff life is made of, it’s the stuff that clogs the pores of our very souls. Big things never can get under our skin the way little ones can. It’s always the little things that make us sick and tired of life. As Anton Chekhov once wrote, “Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day to day living that wears you out.”

I know exactly what he meant. This past week, I got so worn out I could barely post anything. Bad enough that I wasn’t feeling well. Then things got a lot worse because I was erroneously billed for hundreds of dollars I never owed in the first place.

Since Chekhov was a medical doctor before he won any acclaim as a writer, I wonder what he would have thought about my everyday difficulty with (GASP!) healthcare insurance. For the past week, I’ve been getting the worst grief about it. Not because I lacked medical insurance. Oh, no. Not that. I have good insurance from two different but reputable carriers. I have both primary AND secondary insurance coverage. That wasn’t the problem. Here was the problem: the medical clinic agreed to accept both insurance plans but then refused to process them. Why? Because a couple of wacky chicks in Billing didn’t feel like properly processing -- or even sending out! -- these claims to my secondary insurer.

That’s right. I have been trapped in a “Seinfeld” episode written by Satan himself.

Now that my mini-struggle is almost coming to an end, I know who to blame: those wacky chowderheads at the clinic’s Billing Department. Those chicks who kept showing up for work but were never really there. You know the type. They physically go to work, but their brains go somewhere else. They focus not on their jobs but on the body count at “Downton Abbey.” Or on locating “The Best Doughnuts in the Twin Cities.” I would call them bureaucratic demons, but you have to be kind of organized to be bureaucratic. They weren’t. They were just stupid.

That’s why I’m not naming real names in my narrative. I’m not giving out actual dates or amounts or any other tidbits that would identify the clinic or my insurance companies. They’re not at fault; the clinic’s billing department is. So the medical clinic will be called Ragnar Medical Clinic. My insurance companies will be know as Acme Primary and STAR Secondary. So the guilty party is going to be the main topic of this discussion -- and with good reason.

I’m sharing this bureaucratic bad dream with you because it provides an important lesson on navigating life’s little challenges. My point here is that you can’t back down from this kind of red tape and bitchy incompetence. Fight back!

If no one on the inside will help you, then go outside -- and keep looking. Keep asking good people to help you.  Eventually, they will.

My story is nearing a happy ending because I stumbled across some dedicated public servants who were willing to act as my advocate. They knew how to cut through the red tape, and they did.

I never could have gotten anything resolved without their help, though, because the Billing Department considered me a low life cheat.

Their formula was a simple one: Low income = Low life = Lying Cheat.

Of course, they wouldn’t come out and actually say that directly to me. But the phone conversations I had with them left no doubt in my mind that they considered patients like me to be an inferior subspecies.

The employees I spoke with were so adamently convinced of their own superiority that they were immobilized by their own prejudice. They didn’t want to listen to anything I said. They didn’t want to believe anything I said. They just wanted to blame my billing problem on me and my insurance companies. Nothing was ever their fault because they believed their computer and their input were incapable of error. Period.

Have you ever tried to reason with such inflexible, irrational bureaucrats? No matter how simple your problem is, such drones are incapable of assisting you.

In my case, I was erroneously charged twice. The first claim had been paid by STAR Secondary but not recorded as being received by the Ragnar Medical Clinic. The second claim hadn’t been paid by STAR because Billing had never sent out the claim to them. So, of course STAR hadn’t paid the second claim.

The fun began when I called the Billing Department at the Ragnar Medical Clinic and tried to get this straightened out.

Seldom have I spoken with such unapologeticlly condescending drones. They may not sound rude and defensive in this re-telling. But that's only because the snark got edited out. You didn’t have to endure the icy tone of their voices. Or put up with that endless back-and-forth telephone exchange that went nowhere. I did. It’s hard, however, to capture all that hostility on paper when mere words cannot recreate their venomous hiss.

You’ll have to trust me on this one: those billing chicks were too testy for their own good.

It wasn’t enough to tell them that I’d received an Explanation of Benefits from STAR in the mail. Or that the information in the EOB proved STAR had already paid my first claim. I also had to recite the exact date I’d received the EOB in the mail-- as though I’d been lying and they were trying to trap me into a confession.

Even then, the drone I called (and, later on, her supervisor) didn’t seem to believe I’d received anything.

As for the second claim, both Drone #1 and Supervisor were under the misconception that the adjusted bill for $182.55 was, in reality, my deductible. Wrong! In the first place, an insurance deductible would never be such an odd, uneven amount. And then, STAR had never received the second claim. So how could STAR have told anything to the clinic’s Billing Department?

I tried to reason with her but got nowhere. Then Drone #1 abruptly ordered me to “call your insurance company.”

“No,” I replied, “You’re going to have to call STAR about it.”

She completely ignored my remark and issued another command: “You have two choices. You can call your insurance company. Or, you can talk to my supervisor, and she’ll explain how it works to you.”

So I called STAR. In fact, I ended up calling three different times and getting three different people who told me that STAR Secondary had never received any claim from the Ragnar Medical Clinic.

Of course, I called the Billing Department back. I even requested to speak to a supervisor. But it didn’t do any good. Like her drone, Supervisor kept asking for the date of the EOB from Claim #1. Also like her drone, Supervisor refused to contact STAR.

“There’s no need,” she told me, “because our records indicate they’ve already been sent.” She also refused to do any re-checking or research. She also told me my bill for $182.55 was really my deductible -- and paying that was my responsibility.

Then Supervisor dismissed me with the old telephone ploy. She didn’t want to deal with me anymore, so she abruptly demanded, “Is this the number you can be reached at?” Then she rattled off my phone number.

I tried to ask her another question, but she cut me off by impatiently repeating the question and rattling off my phone number again.

After I answered yes, she said she’d call me back.

Of course, she never did. She just needed some way to blow me off -- mission accomplished. Never heard from her again.

No one likes to admit it, but too many people in 21st Century America still associate low income with character deficiency. And a lot of these people work in billing departments. They shouldn’t. Having a problem with our bills can mean all kinds of things. Contacting the billing department doesn’t actually mean you’re a scammer trying to weasel out of paying your bill. Usually, it means you’re acting like a responsible adult who’s trying to take care of business. So check your ugly bias at the door, ladies. Start trying to help patients instead of stereotyping them. Start listening, stop dismissing.


Must everyone who comes to an affordable healthcare clinic be dismissed as trailer trash? Not everyone who calls billing is related to Honey Boo Boo. Not every non-millionaire is a deadbeat dad or a welfare mother or a garden variety grifter. Sometimes people who don’t have a lot of money just don’t have a lot of money, that’s all. Sometimes people just get sick and need healthcare. And you’re supposed to help.

You don’t have to love your job. You don’t have to love each and every patient who contacts you, either. You just have to stop making our lives hell.

How I wish Dr. Chekhov were alive today so he could write a play about the absurd heartbreak of obtaining healthcare for the likes of Uncle Vanya and the old sisters of The Cherry Orchard.