$1200 medical bills suck
Monday, October 29th, 2007So today I checked my mail.
I did not get my Netflix (partially because I forgot to send them out).
I did not even get a credit card bill.
My student loan company wasn’t harassing me.
Nope.
I got a nearly $1200 medical bill from my local doctor.
I was really sick when I got back from Italy.
I thought, “I’ll just use my new insurance and go to the doctor”.
It ends up that my new insurance has almost zero doctors in Boston. Every one of theirs I tried to call either hadn’t heard of them, or was a bad phone number.
So I went to a doctor I had been to before. They told me that the $99 I paid for the visit covered me. They said that the average visit cost between $80-$200 if you’re paying out of pocket. No biggie.
Now I see a nearly $1200 bill in my mail. Does it really cost $25 to test for Creatine in my blood? I have no idea, but that was one of the tests.
The real kicker in the pants was that, well, I told the doctors I was paying out of pocket. And then the only thing that the tests came back positive for was Strep. They figured I had the flu as well, but that didn’t show up on any tests. For $1200 I want to know WTF I had exactly.
What’s worse, I’m still coughing. I’m not going back to the doctor to get raped again for medical costs. Being poorly insured sucks.
When I called then insurance company they were like, “Oh there’s a doctor in Stoneham, and one in Needham, and one in Winchester”. I’m like, “I HAVE NO CAR AND I LIVE IN BOSTON AND I DONT FEEL WELL ENOUGH TO TAKE THE COMMUTER RAIL 20 miles!” The woman on the other end didn’t seem to get it. She was clearly outsourced to somewhere in India, and maybe it just didn’t matter to her.
The most frustrating thing is being sick, and then having to call the insurance company several times (because they don’t pick up their phones), and then getting slammed with a huge bill due to their incompetence.
