I Conquered!

I'm here to ramble. No, seriously, I'm going to sit here and just ramble. It could be boring so stop reading here if you are slightly sleepy.

So yesterday afternoon I get a phone call. It was a lovely kind lady calling from a collections agency to inform me that I OWED THEM MONEY!!! HUH???? What did you say??? I kept her on the phone for over 10 minutes frantically asking her questions... I asked her just about everything except for a copy of fingerprints and her shoe size... but I almost thought about it! The kind collections agency informed me that I owed them over a hundred dollars for a Dr. visit that I was a patient at last May. My mind was racing trying to figure out what Dr. I had seen. When she told me the name of the Dr... I didn't recognize the name and I thought for sure... how could I have missed a bill for over a year, and also not know who this doctor was... could it have been a mistake? Our last name, IS Smith after all, not hard to get confused with the thousands of other Smiths' out there! I was somewhere between furious, confused, and distraught. I feel bad for those poor people that have to call and tell you that you owe the collection agency money... really I do... because I had to try very hard to be nice to her. The real killer came though when she told me that the bill had been going to an address I lived at FOUR years ago... in Idaho! At that moment... I was taking all the information in and thinking...... hmm, a doctors appointment that should have been covered by our insurance, I've never seen a bill because it was going to an address that I never gave anyone.... and now I get to deal with a collections agency??? My only thought was: The next person I get on the phone is going to catch a lot from me.

Lucky for all those people at the doctors office, they were not available to talk- so I turned to my best buddy Karli. She has been my moral support ever since college and she makes a real good therapist too!..... she got the privilege of listening to me rant to her for over an hour after I cried on my favorite spot of the kitchen floor! =) Karli helped me figure out what Doctor it was... an office I go to with 6 different Doctors... so of course I didn't remember the fill-in doctor that I saw over a year ago... things were starting to make a little more sense... except for the whole collections part.

I slept terribly and as I got up this morning I mentally prepared myself to call the billing manager at the doctors office. I was angry, scared what they would tell me, and ready for a fight. I knew I couldn't be too nice or they would ignore anything I said and would tell me that it was out of their hands... but I didn't want to be too mean... because that wouldn't get me very far either.

I ended up needing to call an office here in Phoenix named LabCorp, which deals with blood work. The guy at Labcorp, I will call him Dan, answered my call and the first question he asked was: Can you verify your phone number or address please? Me, knowing that they probably had the Idaho address they had given the collection agency, decided to give him my current Arizona address. After I rattled off my Arizona addy, there was a moment of silence... I knew he wasn't seeing that address on his computer screen... so I took it upon myself to then give him my Arizona telephone number.... and then ask him if he saw an Idaho addy on his screen. I sharply explained to him how I had never received a bill and why, I wondered, did nobody put the whole Idaho/Arizona detail together and not call me? His response: Uh-oh.

Dan knew his stuff. We spoke for about a half hour, I was civil, but blunt with him, and let him know that I would not be footing the bill as it was never my fault, and I indeed wasn't going to pay the collection agency a penny.

Of course, I became a little kinder to him after he started to figure out the mistakes on their end. Dan told me that they had filed the insurance wrong, so when it came back denied, they forwarded the bill to me. When they accidentally left off the end of my address and the bill came back in the mail to them, they proceeded to find the best address for me that they could, in Idaho- which of course never got to me either. Over the last year, I guess nobody looked at my Arizona land line phone number and thought about calling it.

I guess in the end, I'm just a little proud of myself and feeling rather justified. (and relieved, for that matter). I'm not a pushy person and I don't like to demand things from others, or be mean. But sometimes, being to quiet, can turn me into a "doormat" as Kieran defined it in a recent post. And I knew I could not afford to be a doormat this time around! I guess this post is my pat on the back to myself- because I dealt with the situation more strongly that I usually might... I didn't back down, or take "sorry" for an answer... and I got the results that I went in for.

I made 2 different people assure me 4 times that it would be pulled back from collections and make a note of it on my account. So at the end of it all, the guy that was wrapping it all up told me that they would contact me in a week and a half to let me know what my co-pay would be after it was picked up from insurance. He asked me if I wanted them to contact me by mail in a week, or if I would rather call them. I obviously chose option B.... I would be happy to call!