Medical moneys
Apr. 28th, 2026 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeToday’s theme was the cost and complications of the cost of medical care. It started with J’s favorite streamer running a GoFundMe campaign to help pay for their cat’s upcoming cancer treatment. Octavia has a nasal lymphoma tumor, and there’s a special kind of radiation that is well tolerated and generally quite successful, but the overall cost is usually prohibitive: $15,000. They dote on their cat and decided to pay it anyway, which was going to eat up all of their savings (which is especially problematic given that her husband’s whole work team was laid off last year). They hoped that the GoFundMe might raise $1000 or so… and they were in tears to have the campaign surpass $21,000 within two hours.
Meanwhile, we are still struggling to get J’s colonoscopy properly paid for by the insurance company – the problem is that the hospital has outsourced its billing department and the people are agreeable on the phone but never follow through. He’s been trying for more than three months to get them to correct the coding. Grr. Anyway, I’ve now drafted letters for him to the CEO of the hospital and to the insurance company – one would think that the fact that the other two providers had correctly coded their charges for the same event would matter, but it may not. I feel strongly that we need to follow through with this to the very end, especially the part about letting the hospital administration know how bad this billing department is, because other patients won’t have the same resources we do to fight back when mistakes like this are made.
Meanwhile, we are still struggling to get J’s colonoscopy properly paid for by the insurance company – the problem is that the hospital has outsourced its billing department and the people are agreeable on the phone but never follow through. He’s been trying for more than three months to get them to correct the coding. Grr. Anyway, I’ve now drafted letters for him to the CEO of the hospital and to the insurance company – one would think that the fact that the other two providers had correctly coded their charges for the same event would matter, but it may not. I feel strongly that we need to follow through with this to the very end, especially the part about letting the hospital administration know how bad this billing department is, because other patients won’t have the same resources we do to fight back when mistakes like this are made.
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