I had a call from a testing outfit the day I mailed the not late check, asking if I would pay over the phone. They bought my true story immediately, so I presume it was legitimate, just money grubbing.
They may have hired a new third party billing agency, or just hired a new person who isn’t very good at their job. Once you start dealing with large organizations, all sorts of weird behind-the-scenes nonsense can happen with no warning. Some VP of Corporate Fuckery figures out they can save 10 cents a day, and doesn’t care about the customers who end up being harassed.
They don’t, but it might help if they knew about this practice since you are their patient. The doctor has more clout to complain about this to the hospital administration than you do.
It could be incompetence, it could be someone pressured to make their numbers, but it could be a crook inside of billing or someone who hacked into their system. You definitely were right to hang up.
All the info they already had for you, that you confirmed, I presume a scammer can probably get a hold of one way or another. But then to also know what doctor you see, the date of your most recent appointment, what hospital they work from and spoofed the number of their billing office, IMO, makes it less likely to be a scam. Or, if it is, it seems like it would have to be someone working there.
My guess is that it was a legit call and someone just screwed up.
If your appointment was on May 23rd and they implied the bill was due around or before June 3rd, that would mean that they’re requiring payment within about 2 weeks of the appointment date.
Was there a due date on the bill? Were there any dates on the bill that might suggest they keyed it in as March or April 23rd instead of May 23rd?
If you can access your insurance information online it might be worth checking out the dates they used on the claim.
I’d also check to make sure the bill they called you about is the same bill that you recently mailed the check for and not, for example, an older bill that was never paid or a bill for another family member that accidentally had you as the guarantor (once in a while I’ll get bills for my ex because of this).
Years ago my younger sister was being harrassed about a medical bill. I can’t remember now, if she’d already paid it, or her insurance company was supposed to pay it, but the dunning went on for almost a year. She finally got sick of it and paid it.
Less than a week later, she got a refund check for the amount. What the whaaa???
I had one a while back, everything was preauthorized but the insurance company decided they didn’t feel like paying it. For months I was getting letters from the hospital asking me to contact the insurance company and try to get them to pay the bill and letters from the insurance company telling me why they weren’t going to pay for it. IIRC, letters from either side usually contained a few lines that would imply, or explicitly state, that this would all get wrapped up a whole lot sooner if I’d pay the bill myself.
The ones from the hospital would suggest I pay it myself and then get the insurance company to pay me back…but we all know that there was no way they were going to do that. I have exactly zero clout with them and don’t know the ins and outs of all this stuff like the people in the billing department do. In fact, since I figured this would resolve on it’s own and I didn’t want to accidentally say something to either side suggesting I’d pay it myself, I just ignored all the letters and after a while they stopped (when the insurance company finally paid the hospital).
Yeah, that probably would have happened with my sister, too. But she’s a nervous nellie type and didn’t want to take a chance that…what?..she’d get dragged to debtor’s prison? Anyway, it’s a little different in that if the insurance company wanted her to pay, why did she get a refund? Weird and annoying.
With me, I think both the hospital and insurance company knew that this was between them and the ‘ya know, if you want to pay the bill…’ part was tossed to see if maybe I’d cough up the money for fear of ending up in collections.
I had another hospital put me in collections by accident (like, for real by accident, the bill wasn’t even due yet). That was a race against the clock (on my part) to get that absolute train wreck fixed before it ended up on my credit report.
I had an issue with hospital billing that didn’t get fixed until it went to collections.
Previously I had been on my wife’s insurance, as her company had better coverage than mine. Then she left the company, and we went with my company’s plan. Both plans were administered by Anthem.
I went to the ER one night when my ear suddenly started leaking blood. What I assume happened is the receptionist glanced at my insurance card, saw “Anthem” on my card and on her computer screen (I had been there before and was already in the system), and didn’t notice the new policy number.
After 2 weeks I get a letter from the hospital saying my insurance rejected the claim because my wife no longer works for the company. I tell them they must have billed the old insurance and gave them the new information.
After 30 days, same letter. Call again and give them the correct information.
After 60 days, same letter, with a suggestion to call their finance department to make an arrangements if I’m having trouble paying. Call again, letting them know that I have checked with my insurance on-line and see absolutely no sign that they’ve submitted a claim to MY insurance. Give them the correct information again.
After 90 days, same letter. Same phone call. Same giving of information.
After 120 days same letter, with an additional “if you don’t pay up, we’re gonna send you to collections”. Same phone call from me - same imparting of information.
After another month, a letter from a collections agency. I give them a call, tell them the story, including dates and times and who I spoke with for each previous call to the hospital. I tell them clearly “I will pay once I see evidence that someone submitted a claim to my insurance”. The collections agent takes down my insurance information. Within 2 days, I see a claim on my insurance website. A few days later I see an EOB with my portion of the payment. The next day, the collection agent calls again to ask for the copay + some percentage. I tell him I’m happy to pay the copay, but I’m not paying extra for something that is clearly the hospital’s fault. “I understand you need to make money for your service, but talk to the hospital about that because it was their screw-up. I am 100% not at fault”. He agreed, and charged me the copay only. Don’t know how he got paid.
There are two hospitals in my area. I have never returned to that one.
Debt collection gets paid because they buy the debt for less than it’s worth.
If you owed $500, then the collection agency may have only paid $400 for that debt. It’s the hospital that is out that money.
I can beat that. I started getting calls a few months ago from a collections agency - I didn’t pick up the unrecognized number, but the call ID’ed correctly as a bona fide agency that handles delinquent medical bills. So I called them back, told them to stop calling me and send me documentation of what they were claiming I owed. It turned out that it was a bill from five years ago from an anesthiologist when I was in hospital. The anesthiologist had never sent me a bill at any time or submitted anything to my insurance (the hospital had all my information), but after 5 years just sent it to collections, probably motivated by the 6 years statute of limitations on medical bills.
Interesting. So in this type of case, who actually receives the insurance payment?
I’d assume the debt collector. I don’t know how it would work out, exactly, but they probably have all the paperwork associated with it. Once they submit the claim under the correct policy #, I don’t see why they wouldn’t be the ones to receive it.
That said, both debt collection and medical billing are arcane practices that don’t necessarily follow logic or sense, so who really knows?
You need to be a little careful with this. If something goes to collections, even if it is resolved in a manner that you are satisfied with, it can still ding your credit rating. You need to be sure that if it shows up on your credit report, you dispute it as an error. You can do this directly with the rating agency. And I would not hand over a dime to a collections agency until they have agreed (in writing) that they will completely rescind any report they have made to a credit agency as an error. If it is reported as “went to collections then paid” or “went to collections and partially paid by agreement”, that dings your credit.
When the hospital tossed me into collections (by accident), every time I called the hospital, the first thing they’d tell me is that I should call the collections place. I refused to do that. I had a handful of reasons for that, but one of which is that it wasn’t my problem. They screwed it up so they can fix it. Which they eventually did.
I have a friend that, for some unknown (to me) reason*, worked for a collections agency for a while when she was in college. One of the “tricks” they used is that if a debt was creeping up on the 7 year time limit (or whatever it is), she’d call them up and try to make some type of ‘to good to pass up’ deal. For example, she’d have a $500 debt and ask the person for five dollars “just so I can show my boss I collected something on it and we can close the file”. As you might have already guessed, the act of sending in the $5 resets the clock.
So, yeah, get everything in writing.
Also, I have no idea if this was worthwhile or not, but one time when I was helping someone with a collections issue, after an agreement was reached and they sent something in writing, I had the person get a cashier’s check just to make sure the collection agency wouldn’t have access to their CC or bank info.
*She’s one of those people that gets described as ‘the nicest person in the world’, why she worked for some slimy company, I have no idea.
I think even without sending any money, if you acknowledge the validity of the debt in any way it resets the clock.
I use the free site creditkarma, I found it had a useful guide to dealing with debt collection agencies, including template letters for various scenarios.
In any event, in my case it seems to have worked. Since I wrote back to them, it has disappeared from my credit report completely and I haven’t heard from them again.
Yeah. I went through my shred box and found the stub. July 11. So WTF?
FYI it’s from Froedtert.
Your OP says you paid a bill from a doctor and Googling, Froedtert is a hospital. I assume everyone already knows that doctors bill separately from hospitals?
JFC it was just a question.
It just means that you could have simply pointed that out to them and that’d be the end of it.
I wasn’t saying WTF to you. I was saying it about them demanding their money before it was due.
I didn’t have the billing statement on me when they called. So I couldn’t point that out right then.