Importance of Checking Your Medical Bills
We talk about saving money all the time with deals and coupons, but I haven’t talked about this before – checking your medical bills to make sure you haven’t been overcharged. I was reminded this week about the importance of doing so!
Long story short – over the past 2 years my husband, myself and all my kids have had tons of dental treatments. Miscellaneous cleanings, flourides, xrays, fillings, caps and crowns. We usually pay the balance each time we are the dental office, so I was surprised to open a bill about 2 months ago that said we owed $893!! I was floored! What the heck? I decided to get to the bottom of this – and quick!
First, I requested an itemized bill from the dentist. Every single procedure with its line item cost, along with every insurance payment. After receiving the itemized bill, I sat down with my online dental claims account and started going through each and every person in the house, marking off what had been done and paid for, until that part was complete. What I was left with – well, it left me speechless.
Going back to over a year ago, there were things that my dentist office had either not submitted or submitted and coded incorrectly. For instance – I have a 17 yr old, 16 yr old and 14 yr old twins. My insurance allows for them to get flouride until they are 18. My dental office was coding my 16 & 18 yr olds as adults, so insurance was not paying for the flouride OR the 2nd set of bitewings! There were multiple issues like this.
After about 4 hours of weeding through everything, I came up with an itemized list of what my dental office had done incorrectly. I sent them a letter detailing each item, line by line. I also explained that I would be happy to pay my balance of $187 (the balance I figured was correct), once they resubmitted everything. Let me just say that I LOVE my dentist, but some of the people that work there are less than accomodating and I truly think they thought I was trying to be a dead beat and not pay my bills. But guess what?! Within 2 weeks I started getting streams of letters from my insurance company with this or that bill paid!
Wanna know what the actual total came to? $187.09 – DANG I’m good! 
Anyhoo – you can bet that I will NEVER just pay a medical bill without getting an itemized list and triple checking it to make sure I wasn’t over charged. It kind of makes me sick to my stomach to think about what I have probably paid in the past just because I didn’t take the time to go over my bills thoroughly.
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That is very interesting. It presented me some ideas and I’ll be posting them on my website soon. I’m bookmarking your blog and I’ll be back. Thanks again!