I had some oral surgery in February of last year. I paid several hundred dollars cash for my portion of the surgery, insurance paid some, the rest was a write-off. I didn’t hear anything until now, my statement skips straight from 3/1/10 to 7/7/11, so now I am having a surprise bill jumped on me and threatening to go to collections. Apparently this balance has been forwarded from month to month with no correspondence on their part.
I called up the dentist’s office and they said that they were sorry I hadn’t received a bill, said I could have looked at my EOB and sent them money (yeah, right, going to just mail someone a check based on that), and that they were going back and cleaning up records from the last couple of years.
I can’t figure out what terms to google for this to find out if it’s kosher, apparently no combination of “health insurance statute of limitations” is correct. It’s not an insignificant amount of money they want, and given how long it took me to save up for the original surgery, I’d be terribly sad to pay them this money.
I live in AR, if it matters, but if someone will help with the googling, I can help look for an answer.
Who “wrote off” the “rest”? Was there an agreement between you and the surgeon that he’d accept whatever insurance paid plus the cash you provided up front, or was there an expectation that you’d make up any outstanding difference?
A little Googling leads me to believe the answer is two years:
It sounds like they can still pursue this as they see fit until two years after you made your payment. I’m not sure whether this time limit still applies if the debt goes to collections, though my guess would be “don’t count on it.”
IA, of course, NAL.
ETA: For the record, my Google terms were “debt collection statute of limitations”.
Also, keep in mind that the statute of limitations just means that they can’t sue you for the debt. There’s nothing barring them from reporting the debt to a credit agency, which would still ding your credit score. See here for more details.
99% sure he means the difference between the official fee and the fee the doctor’s office agreed to charge to patients with that particular insurance company. Like how a blood test technically costs $500 but the negotiated fee with BC/BS is $40 and I pay 20% of that. You could say they “wrote off” the other $460.
The situation was supposed to be something like [made up numbers]$2000 for the procedure, I paid $500, the insurance has a contract price of $1500, so they paid $1000 and the other $500 is a write-off. In this case, after submitting the claim, the insurance company said they’d only pay $750, for example, meaning that the other $250 is still on the hook.[/made up numbers]
I understand that under normal circumstances, yes, the patient is responsible for that difference. But damn, to come after me after the teeth have been out of my head for 18 months? If the surgeon has been able to afford the payments on his car for this long, it just seems petty, and I thought maybe I could weasel out of it. That, and the lady I spoke with was horrendously rude, and I’d love to rub it in her face.
I technically DO have a HSA that I could wiggle the claim into, but I don’t have the money to pay the whole thing up-front to get reimbursed :smack:
I think I’m going to end up trying to make payments, submit to HSA, then submit the reimbursement to the dentist, then submit that balande, etc.
My GP apparently had some problems with his office staff a while back. We got a bill that included stuff as far back as two years. We made them send us documentation that explained the charges (because we couldn’t remember.) In the end we owed the money so we paid up.
My doctor gets paid in pieces. $15 co-pay when I visit, the insurance pays most or all of the rest but there is always something that isn’t covered so he is back to me to collect that, sometimes months later. In the case of my GP he waited a long time but I did owe the money.
They probably picked the two year limit because that’s what they can legally go after in court. That doesn’t mean they ever would go after it in court. They might shift it to a collection agency, which could be a nag. Depending upon the amount, they would likely write it off. Of course your credit could suffer. You could add a note for the credit file in response. If your other stuff in the file is clean, this would not hurt too much in my opinion.
For example, my brother’s estate had a late $4,500 medical bill presented. The estate attorney talked privately with the doctor’s attorney. Doctor’s attorney said it was too small to go to court over. They were simply writing it off as uncollectable.
I’m in the process of rebuilding my awful, awful credit as it is, so I plan on just sucking up and paying it if I have to. If there’s one thing I don’t need, it’s another ding on my credit. I’m going to call the insurance tomorrow and verify the billing woman’s story, but it would appear that everything is legit. Thanks for your help, everyone!
Couple things to ponder. The SOL doesn’t start until the debt goes into default, it does not start from the date the services were provided or when one is originally billed. Also, if the provider has not considered the debt to be in default, that 2 year SOL may not have started yet.
don’t pay it!!! wait for it to go to collections, call the company when they send you the letter saying they bought the dept. When you call offer to pay 1/2, let them talk you up to 60%, get your letter of deletion, send it to credit agency, and sit back with no more than a dozen points off the old credit score. worked 2x so far.
If this is the issue for you I would recommend talking with the doctors office. I had an insurance problem with some stitches I got and was able to work out a payment plan with the doctors office that I could afford while I dealt with the insurance company. In the end I was able to pay off the doctor and got the reimbursement from the insurance company later.
If nothing else, if it took 18 months for them to bill you, it seems reasonable that it would take you 18 months to pay them back. I’d go over there being very, very calm and very, very reasonable and just keep making this point until they put you on a payment plan you can afford.
The lady on the phone offered to let me pay it back in 90 days, even though they “don’t normally do that” :rolleyes:. I figure that so long as I am making payments, there’s no way they’d bother sending it to collections.
My credit literally can’t take the hit, or I’ll just end up in debtor’s prison. College is such a wacky time, amazing how one can both be irresponsible with credit cards AND end up with tens of thousands in student loans. :o