Enough to make you sick

So, with our brand new University health plan tucked safely under my belt. I set off last August to cure my sciatica. Physical therapy, deep tissue work, acupuncture... the net effect was a substantial reduction in the symptoms. I enjoyed the holiday season. Then the trouble started...

HealthSouth, the physical therapy provider, sent me a bill for $90. Strange I thought, since I'd paid my co-pays, and they were an in-network provider, I shouldn't owe anything. "Your co-pay should have been $35, not $20" they said. OK, I figure that I just got it wrong, and paid the extra - we have a range of co-pays to choose from on our little medical cards - $35 is one of them.

Then another bill arrived. This time they wanted $120. I called United Healthcare, our 'provider'. NO, they said, you don't owe anything. So I called HealthSouth, spoke sternly in a British accent, and left it at that. Then United Healthcare sent me a statement, showing I owed Healthsouth $248, because they are NOT an in-network provider. They enclosed a note - "You could have saved money on this bill by using an in-network provider".

Resigned to my fate, I called HealthSouth and told them to send me a complete invoice for what I owed. When THAT arrived, it showed I owed them $376, not $248. Thoroughly annoyed with all this, I wrote nasty-grams to United Health, HealthSouth, and the VP of HR at the University. I paid the $248, and said "not a penny more" until everyone gets their act together and gives me a final, itemized, intelligible bill.

So today, I received another vague invoice from HealthSouth for $120 - not QUITE the difference between the check I sent and the amount they originally requested. I decided to phone United Healthcare one more time. A very nice woman there just told me that HealthSouth IS an in-network provider, and I only ever owed the co-pays. So now I'm $248 out on what I've over-paid to HealthSouth, and I still have  bill for $120 !! It's enough to make you sick...

As happy as I am to be an American, I still look fondly back on my British days when I could say  "we have a national health care system paid for out of taxes, and no-one asks you if you have insurance before they'll check to see if you are having a heart attack, and where they don't charge you $25 for an aspirin".