Subject to Change

If this is actually legal I sense another online petition coming on.

We just received a bill for Cole’s birth. In case you haven’t heard, he’s fourteen months old. The bill was dated 5/7/08, which makes the billing cycle 425 days (14 months to the day, plus leap year, minus the two days before our actual release date), not 30 days, not 60 or 90, not even 120. It’s 425 flipping days! My kid has been to the doctor or urgent care a dozen times since then and each of those bills came in a timely fashion. We’ve even paid the bill for Kelly’s emergency visit to the same hospital six weeks after the birth! Why not wait eighteen years to send the bill? That’d be a great graduation gift for my child.

Riddle me this: what reasonable person expects to see the first bill for services rendered a year ago, unless they’ve established some sort of big-box style deferred payment plan? And, what ethical business expects that they can simply demand payment in full for services rendered a year ago when there hasn’t been any follow up in between?

You may ask: what dollar amount is appropriate and not too embarrassing to request a year later without any heads-up to your customer? My answer, of course, is zero. But, I probably would’ve paid up to a hundred or so without saying a word just to get it over with. The amount we’d been expecting was $250 (according to our insurance data), and with all the medical bills coming in at that time I was under the assumption that I had actually just paid it and forgotten. Especially after receiving the bill for Kelly’s extra procedure I assumed we were in the clear.

The dollar amount on this bill is $1850, and it came just in time to miss tax refunds and our economic stimulus check. Maybe eight months ago I was worried that I might still see a bill this size. There was an asterisk in my insurance guide, after all. I was dreading, but preparing for sticker shock. About the time Cole started walking is probably when I really started to forget about worrying.

In fourteen months my son has cut nearly all his teeth, learned to walk BACKWARDS, had an ear infection that ruptured his ear drum, learned to eat solid foods and has quite the adult palate, has gotten off of formula, has learned to communicate verbally and with visual cues, has probably learned how to cuss, has taken his first airplane ride on an airline that is now out of business, has been to another city far away, sat inside a pumpkin, has seen two caves, has been on a twelve hour road odyssey, has been in swim classes, has had his first, second, third and fourth haircut, has been camping in below freezing weather twice, learned to dance to Haddaway like the SNL skit, has been licked by dogs, a cow, goats and a giraffe, has had baby talk with his father over the phone, and has crapped all over his mother in a restaurant. Oh, and one more thing: he celebrated his FIRST FLIPPING BIRTHDAY! Fourteen months after they brought him into the world, the hospital has just now figured out how to mail the bill.

I’m not ready to put Elmbrook Memorial on the S**T List yet. I need to make the phone calls to the insurance company and see what’s really going on here. A simple mistake, no matter how stupid, is forgivable. Since I’ve never even seen an itemized explanation of benefits I’m guessing that some intern over at Elmbrook is trying to be clever about covering an error by circumventing the system. The bill only tells me that I’m being charged for “4 NORTH, LAB, and PHARMACY.” That certainly isn’t enough information for me to determine why something (allegedly) wasn’t covered by my insurance. I am annoyed enough at Elmbrook to call them out on it, though. I certainly won’t be recommending them to anyone that I know. If I think about it long enough I just might take my story to the internet and post updates on it, so that others have the opportunity to benefit from my experience.