Subject to Change

If you watched the Milwaukee 225 yesterday you would know that our day got better, in spite of our morning frustration.

The weather was great for spending a day outside: overcast and mild. Maybe it was a bit too damp for racing, though. Our section of the track claimed three victims right in front of us! We even went home with a few small pieces of the wrecks, which someone on the cleanup crew collected for my son.

I don’t know much of anything about racing, but we all had a good time.

My family made me a card this year. We decided to bring it along to the Indy races for autographs!

On the front of the card, they used a peanut butter jar lid to make it look like a camera.

I wanted to share this toast from our wedding last night.

Addy said our flag flew on a B-1 bomber over Saudi Arabia. It’s hard to beat a wedding gift like that!

Thank you, Kevin!!!

Kelly went looking for a flower girl dress today, only to discover that David’s Bridal is sold out.

There’s a recall on most styles of girl’s dresses, which means that there’s been a run on the remaining dresses. They told her that the federal government issued the recall.

True or false?

Was it in the stimulus bill? If so, every knob who signed it just lost our vote!

Does anyone know where I can get a size 24M-2T flower girl dress?

A summary, in case you haven’t noticed that blogging has been light around here for a while:

• Returned home from Columbus, Ohio on Wednesday. I had a lot of things to blog about and no time. I may decide to use my photos of the “deployment” to blog about it all retroactively. That could be fun.
• Switching jobs on Monday, to a former employer in Milwaukee. This should give me more free time to catch up with my internet people!
• Kelly’s mom is out of our house, and not a moment too soon. We tried to do our Christian duty by taking care of her during her cancer treatments. It’s just that toddlers, multiple dogs, and prescription drug addicts don’t mix. Add my travel schedule to that and the stress level was a little too high.
• We have a wedding date! The hall, photographer, DJ, and dress are taken care of. I’d love it if anyone has any advice regarding inexpensive ways to manage the rest: flowers, tuxedos, cake, decorations, etc.
• I’ve still got a significant financial issue to deal with. With all of the above items falling into place this is now the number one stress issue for us. We’ve been talking to professionals and the outlook is not pretty.

Want details? Leave a comment and I’ll try to clue you in.

I called about the bills I’ve been blogging about. And, if you’ve been reading you may now be wordering why I used the plural form. Grab a cup of coffee and make yourself comfortable because this gets really amusing.

I decided to make the call to the hospital, to express my disappointment at the way this has all played out. Somehow, during my discussion with the first tier of customer service I discovered that the bill I now hold is NOT for the birth of my son. It’s a bill for the second procedure I blogged about. I never thought to check the date of the procedure on this bill. The representative told me that the bill for the birth, currently $1850, was still awaiting a final response from the insurance company.

I demanded to be directed to a supervisor of customer service. After talking with her for a while I managed to get her to admit that the $1850 had been paid, partially. I still owe $250 for the birth, officially. Of course, you know what I think of that at this point. I was also told that they could find no record of my payment for the second procedure. This woman agreed to send me the itemized bill for the birth, which is a little over a page long and makes for interesting reading. I now have the documentation to confirm that all but $250 of the birthing costs are paid. The manager admitted to me that there had been some training issues in the billing department. You would think that seventeen months would be enough time to get that all sorted out, but I guess not. I was told that I’d need to provide copies, front and back, of the canceled check to confirm my payment of the second procedure. Have you ever tried to request a copy of your checks after more than a year?

I was extremely confident that I’d paid for the other service. I remember finding the bill and the payment when I was researching the “bill” that arrived fourteen months after Cole’s birth. Of course now I was doubting myself, because I haven’t been able to keep organized in years. I assumed it was possible that I’d screwed up.

I made the call to the “consumer advocate” at the hospital anyway, a woman who told me that she was some sort of “educator.” She just happened to be the one carrying the pager for the day. She was nice enough, but wasn’t in a position to do anything for us other than take notes. I gave her our story as I understood it at that point, talking her through the series of statements and when they arrived. Kelly joined me on speaker phone and we made a point of telling her how obnoxious the billing department was the first time we called. We wondered out loud just how many of the “non-bill” bills get paid by customers because they look so intimidating. The advocate took notes and promised that someone would get back to us in seven to ten days.

Tonight I went through all my paperwork, to find my payment and to get everything in one place. I made some amazing discoveries. First, I did pay for the second service, on my Discover card. Kelly said I should try to dispute it to bring it to the hospital’s attention. Since the payment was made more than a year ago I doubt it can be reversed. Second, the amount billed for the second procedure has changed. One of the three charges was changed from over $13,000 to $980. So, if you read what’s going on here the way I do somebody edited the bill and resubmitted it, after I’d paid for the service. My insurance paid again, I assume. I think I’ll be giving them a call to let them know that they’ve been ripped off, too.

This is the story so far, with these two hospital bills. Meanwhile, we’ve received a final notice from another facility. Kelly had a visit there more than a year ago, for which we paid our $20 co-pay. This doctor’s office is trying to bill us for the full amount of the visit, claiming that they didn’t accept our insurance on that date. This is an interesting argument because THEY calculated our co-pay and we had a referral. Our insurance provider tells us that the claim was denied because the facility is incorrectly billing. That’s right, yet another provider is attempting to dump their accounting (and staffing) issues off on the customer. 

These practices are downright unethical and arrogant. I’d really like to find a way to get compensation for the time we’ve had to spend doing someone else’s job. I guess there’s a reason we don’t tip for medical procedures.

I blogged twice about the hospital bill for Cole’s birth arriving (here and here). We may have just actually recieved the final bill, more than seventeen months later. The total amount is $250 as we expected, not $1850. Briefly, this is what it took for us to get to this point:

Since blogging about this originally I discovered that the hospital did send out an estimate right away, explaining our expected costs. It was in the form of a letter, explaining that they’d worked things out with the insurance and estimated our co-pay to be $250. There was no due date, nor did this paper look like a bill. They included an envelope for our convenience. I set this paper aside and forgot about it, probably because friends had advised me to wait for the actual bills to arrive before paying anything. This was the only correspondence for more than a year, when we recieved the non-bill bill that set me off.

The $1850 “bill” that arrived fourteen months after the birth looked official. When you place it side by side with the actual bill I now have you can’t tell the difference from a distance greater than about a foot and a half. The difference is in the fine print. The fourteen month statement has no due date. It also has a disclaimer at the top implying that it’s an estimate and informing us to contact our insurance, which is what we did.

Our insurance confirmed that we owed $250. We were told that the hospital submitted a bill, which was paid. The hospital submitted a second bill, not because they were underpaid, but because they had changed their rates! Our insurance actually agreed to pay that, too. It was shocking to hear, because the hospital is supposed to be under contract with the insurance providers to only charge a certain amount for each service. Kelly and I had a good laugh at the arrogance of this and called the hosptial armed with this information. The woman Kelly spoke to at the hospital actually had the nerve to confirm everything we’d been told. They felt that they had still been underpaid. She told Kelly that they were in the process of billing the insurance one more time and would send us the bill for the difference, too bad, so sad.

The actual bill has now arrived, in the amount of $250. Nowhere on it does it say “final statement,” which is frustrating given the history of this exchange and everything I’ve been told about this particular hospital’s billing practices. I’ve since learned from several other patients that this facility is notorious for double billing. It’s also interesting to note that the amounts due for each of three line items on this bill have changed significantly. The total for the three is now $2394.17, minus our insurance payment of $2144.17 is $250.

I’ll be making my best effort to pay this bill, but only for the purpose of closing this account. I don’t feel I should owe the facility a dime at this point and the thought has crossed my mind that I ought to look into suing them for my money back after I mail the check. We might also make an angry phone call to the hospital first, regarding their customer service.

Think about what occured here for a minute. The hospital immediately sent me a “courtesy letter,” angling for my co-pay. Given the way this all played out, do you think that payment would’ve even been booked if I’d made it? I doubt it very much! More than a year later they decided to side-step the insurance company to see if they could extract blood from a turnip. I’m not going to sugar coat it, that’s what they did. After butting heads with the insurance for so long they decided that I should do their job for them by calling my provider on their behalf, or I should just pay them off instead so they wouldn’t have to bother anymore. Do you think there’d be a $1600 refund in my mail box right now if I’d paid that first “bill” instead of ranting about it on the internet and tipping off Jay Weber? I doubt that very much also!

Thank you all, especially Owen, Fred, Steve, and Jay, who supported me during this ordeal. It really helped to know that you were behind me, and to get the second opinions. Everyone else, please remember my example! You may need it one day.

I’m of the mind right now to petition for a new law limiting billing cycles (Cole’s Law). I’m just not sure whether that would serve to aggrivate the situation, because the hospitals could just send out bills for full service costs to side step it. What if they had to refund a portion of the over estimate to the customer? Am I thinking too liberally right now?

This week I attended a conference in Las Vegas. Call me crazy, but I recognized that this might be the only opportunity I’ll have to take Kelly somewhere special for a very long time. So she went along, and so did my seventeen month old son. My schedule at the conference was light enough that we were able to do quite a bit of exploring together.

There are a few things we learned about Las Vegas on this trip. Kelly and I are both glad that we had this chance to see the city before planning a real vacation there. I think we would’ve been sorely dissapointed by the Vegas nightlife had we gone there with larger expectations of a relaxing trip. In two days we walked the strip from Mandalay Bay to Treasure Island, which is about three quarters of the whole way. We’ve got blisters on our feet and a whole new perspective on the city. All three of us are completely wiped out!

We stayed in Mandalay Bay at THE hotel. From the airport Madalay Bay looks like it could be the largest hotel on the strip. You’ll never get an appreciation for the scale until you see Vegas for yourself. It takes twenty minutes just to walk from one location inside most of the Las Vegas hotels to any other location within the same hotel. I’m not kidding. One morning I dropped Kelly off at the pool, but she needed to go back to our room to drop off her valuables because there were no lockers. She told me the round trip from the pool to the room took 45 minutes. Of course any trip from point A to point B in Las Vegas takes you through a casino. That’s by design.

We didn’t really experience the legendary Vegas hospitality. I’m pretty sure it’s reserved for the customers who are spending big bucks in the casinos. We also didn’t find the city to be as family friendly as advertised. Vegas may have cleaned up its image, but it hasn’t gone out of its way to welcome children. By the way, did you know there’s only one changing table on the strip? I found it in a mall at the Venetian, and I never saw another one. We saw a few other babies and plenty of small children but I have no idea how those parents were dealing with their families. You can’t do much in Vegas except gamble and eat really expensive food. Kids pretty much rule out either of those things. Even taking in a show is pretty much out of the question with children, unless you’re looking to spend the big bucks. I would’ve liked to see Blueman Group, but wasn’t about to pay over $100 a seat when I can see them in Chicago for half that price. For kid stuff you can do there are the fountains at the Bellagio (free – every 15 minutes at night), the PG-13 rated pirate show and booty dancing at Treasure Island (also free), lions at the MGM Grand (free), a shark reef at Mandalay Bay ($16.95), a dolphin habitat at The Mirage ($16.95?), some malls, a few rides, and a few more indoor attractions that we didn’t have a chance to check out. Did I mention that all the swimming pools close before 8pm or earlier? What do you suppose the casinos want you to do after dark?

I mentioned that we learned a lot on this trip. First of all, I’ve always heard rumors of “the cheap Vegas vacation.” Having been there now I’m not sure where that legend comes from. We did discover that prices dropped dramatically as we traveled north on the strip. At Mandalay Bay the restaurants are fairly upscale, with most of them shamelessly boasting $40 plus entrees. The Red Square is a caviar bar, where you can expect to pay $200 for an ounce of Caviar. Once we passed the Bellagio we started noticing more buffets and meals under $20. We never did find the legendary five dollar buffet anywhere. The Coffee Shop inside Treasure Island treated us very nicely and gave us our money’s worth on each of our $13 entrees, and the twelve dollar fruit plate. I learned a valuable lesson with that meal, though. Smoked salmon and six glasses of lemonade do not sit well when you’ve been in the desert heat for the past four hours. If I’m ever in Las Vegas again I think I’ll make it a point to avoid eating anything uncooked when the temperature outside is above 90 degrees.

Another lesson we learned is that it’s not easy to get around Vegas on foot. Walking through the casinos adds time to any trip and it’s hot outside. Traffic on the street wasn’t terrible this time of year, I would’ve considered driving. There are free trams connecting Mandalay Bay to Luxor and Excalibur, from there you can cross bridges to New York, New York and the MGM Grand. Another free tram runs between Treasure Island and The Mirage.  If you walk all the way to the back of the MGM Grand you can hop on a monorail for 5 bucks (15 dollar all day pass). That will get you to almost the far north end of the strip. We entered the monorail coming south from Bally’s, and I didn’t make a mental note of all the other stops. Follow that link and you’ll see that the monorail may be expanded to connect to the airport. I’m all in favor of that! It would be a great way to reach the strip.

The reason I’m writing all of this information about our trip is because of one of the other things we learned in Vegas: nobody knows anything! Ninety nine percent of the people you meet on the strip aren’t from there and they’re just as confused as you are. The people who work on the strip don’t know much outside their little sphere of influence, so you can’t ask anyone how to get anywhere, what’s going on, or what time the show starts. You need to ask the bellman where your luggage is, ask the bartender what’s in a mojito, and ask your waiter for the check. Any other question is pretty much going to get you deferred to someone else twenty minutes away, across the casino.

I think all three of us had a really good time on this trip, but we’ll definately be sans children next time and there will be a much larger entertainment budget. All we were able to do on this trip was eat and see these legendary places for ourselves. In 48 hours, that agenda was plenty! I thought we’d all had enough of the desert by the time we left, but you should’ve seen Cole on the plane. He was hamming it up, introducing himself to the people all the way in the back seats.

UPDATE - Some second thoughts after sleeping on this post:

We didn’t venture off the strip, but it looked like prices drop dramatically if you head east or west. So does your ability to travel, though. I looked up room rates at THE hotel. This time of year the rates start at $169 a night. I imagine you could find cheaper along the strip, too. If you’re going for the once in a lifetime trip, budget for a place on the strip. It’ll be worth it not to have to find a way to get around! Otherwise, the Rio and Hard Rock are off the strip and I saw shuttles to both. Perhaps they’re the place to stay on a budget? I also saw Best Westerns and discount motels nestled in among the big casinos.

Vegas doesn’t photograph well, by the way. In the day the sun is too bright, at night and indoors it’s dark and the lighting is spotty. It’s also hard to get a good angle on anything you might want to shoot. The sights are huge and packed in tight. Practice at home with your camera if pictures are a priority! Find the best way to shoot neon at night, bright lighting in front of a dark backround, dimly lit rooms, and through glass. We found that video was often the best way to get a good shot of everything.

After reading through some of the fliers we brought home I can see that the family friendly activities could be on the part of the strip we didn’t manage to get to. Still, it’s not Disneyland and it’ll cost you to ride the rides.

Restaurants and shops close surprisingly early. In a city with night life like Vegas’, you’d think there would be more 24 hour food options. After 10 or 11pm, your food choices are very limited and you might need to eat fast food in one of the food courts.

You may have read on the BBA that the bank financing my mortgage has gone belly up. The FDIC is stepping in on Monday. Most likely, some other bank will buy my loan for pennies on the dollar and nothing will change from my perspective.

So, just to get this straight: I’ve been way over extended for years now and I’m currently researching my “options,” meanwhile sub-prime borrowers are getting a bail out and now MY BANK? Hell, even Hillary Clinton has people raising cash to pay her bills.

You know something? You all (see above) can go to hell.

Oh, and I’ve got that hospital telling me that they know they’ve been paid, but they really want more money. More on that later.

Quaker Steak and Lube
Damn you, “all you can eat” wings.
Damn you all to hell!