Wednesday, April 09, 2014

You can save 15% in 15 minutes by looking twice at your Medical Bills

Well, maybe not 15%, but you can save a lot. Sometimes even more than 15%!

With our piles of paperwork we are doing lately, we have found that we shouldn't pay a medical bill right away until we thoroughly check into it. 

We've found that they will often send a bill expecting you to pay when sometimes they've already collected the money from insurance. We wonder how many people pay these bills without questioning them.

You might say "Well, if you paid and they received the payment from insurance, they would refund you the overpayment."  Ah, don't be so sure. Just in the past few days we found two bills where if we paid them, we probably wouldn't have ever received a refund.

So, check your bills folks. Think twice. Call them and question the charges. Check with your insurance company.

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Note: for those who want some real life stories and more details, here are two recent cases we had:

1. We had a bill with two charges. One charge went through insurance and the other had not been sent by them to insurance. The bill expected us to pay the second charge in full. On first glance, it looked like the first charge was covered, but the second was not. Before paying, I called them. They looked at it and realized they hadn't put the second charge through insurance. If we would have paid, they would have probably just saw a zero balance and would never have submitted the second charge to insurance.

2. We had a bill where we realized that we had received an Explanation Of Benefits (EOB) from the insurance company that matched the amount on the bill.  When I called the medical billing company, they said they had no record of being paid by insurance. Probably, if we hadn't called them, they would never have realized they were already reimbursed and continued to bill us the amount.

So, you can see, in both cases, if we would not have questioned the bill, we probably would never have received a refund.

So, question those medical bills folks. Save some money!

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