Frustrated

Do any of you deal with insurance?  We deal with insurance a lot.  But luckily most of the time things get covered without much hassle.  Of course when things don’t go right, insurance its such a huge pain to deal with.  No one wants to take responsibility between the medical provider and the insurance, so we end up playing go between, even if the issue has nothing to do with us.

Today it just so happens I was going to talk about the joy of paying bills around here.  How long it takes me to go through the medical bills and make sure everything got covered and paid correctly.  I even took a photo of my desk all set up to start this daunting task.

How nice and neat it currently looks.  Soon it will have a million piles it.

Then the very first letter I open up is from our insurance addressed to Bella.  In it is claims “On 7-2-12 we reviewed your request to cover the proposed service for you and based on the information submitted and your health benefit plan, we determined that the health care services are not covered.”

And what wasn’t covered.  Well it was a new special needs car seat that goes up to 100 pounds.  We didn’t absolutely need the car seat right now, Bella hasn’t quite exceeded the weight on her current car seat.  But we were looking for something that would be able to support her better in the car, because currently she completely slumps over while in the car.  So we have a medical equipment provider who I talked with back in March and he was going to check with insurance and if insurance covered it, order this car seat.  Insurance said they would cover it, the car seat got ordered, two months later in June it got delivered and installed.

Now 4 months after they approved the car seat they are not going to pay for it.  Now that we will either have to contest the decision or somehow return a used car seat to a medical company.  I don’t see this being easy either way we go.  Such fun.

I will say it’s nice that we don’t have to worry about life and death issues.  We don’t have to fight about life saving treatments, etc.  That is a fight I would not want to have to worry about.  So in a way we are lucky.  It just seems like there could be a more efficient way to handle all of this.