In semi-related news involving my deceased first wife.
She died in late 2021. About 6 months later in early 2022 I started receiving monthly bills addressed to her from the hospital / clinic about an unpaid $8K bill from early 2019. So the charges were 2-1/2 years old when she died, and 3 years old when I got the first bill. It appears that for some reason the medical insurer rejected one day of her ongoing chemo treatment. But they’d paid for the prior week(s) and subsequent week(s) promptly way back when. Why not this week? A mystery to be sure.
After a couple months of ignoring these bills because I just couldn’t muster the oomph to mess with this stuff, I called the local hospital billing / collection folks who were nice, but resigned to the abject idiocy they administer every day. They already knew she was deceased, they already knew the creditors’ claims period on her estate had run before they sent their first bill, so the debt was legally uncollectible. But there they were, sending out bills to her.
I said I’d be happy to help them get the insurance reimbursement they were rightly owed, since the treatment that day was real. They resubmitted the charges to insurance and told me to ignore any bill that showed up in the next week or so while their update was flowing through the system. So I ignored that next week’s bill, no more came in later months, and I thought the problem solved.
Meanwhile, just after talking to the hospital billing folks I had called the insurance call center (ouch!) to vouch for the charges. And got no satisfactory answer as to why they hadn’t been paid the first time. “A glitch” was about all the nice lady in India could tell me. And something about “maybe missing records”.
Fast forward almost a year to early 2023. The hospital’s bills in my wife’s name start coming again. Same amount, same date of treatment. Like last time I ignored the first couple of them. Just not looking forward to messing with this one last leftover turd in my shiny new punchbowl.
Yesterday I got a letter from a local collection agency about this unpaid bill; same dates and amounts and they cite the hospital as the original creditor. But now my wife owes the debt to the agency, not the hospital. OK, so far so normal for deadbeats. The letter had all the usual boilerplate including the federally mandated notices about my rights and responsibilities. Plus a local number to call.
I call, and after a brief wait in queue “because your call is important to us” a surprisingly pleasant woman comes on the line. I explain that my wife is deceased, the creditor’s claim period ended 2 years ago, and the debt is null & void. She says “Oh, we’re sorry. I’ll annotate the file and you should not hear from us again unless we need further documentation. Which we usually don’t”.
She offered her condolences about three times and thus ends a 4-year long saga of one clinic trying to collect one bill for one day’s services. I wonder how much total administrative expense was involved between all parties from end to end?