| rev:text
| - It's time for us to find a new pediatrician. Sad really, we have been seeing Dr Tenby for almost 7 yrs, and he's been our pediatrician for two newborn's at the hospital. I have never been particularly fond of his "bedside" manner, but my wife likes him and it's convenient to where we live, so she keeps taking our 4 kids. However, his office staff is the worst. Lately, we don't even get to see Dr Tenby, just his NP. That doesn't really bother us too much because she's nice and capable, but it would be nice to see the actual Dr sometimes. I just think he's like every other Dr nowadays, too busy. Trying to overbook appts all day to make up for the lack of income thanks to Obamacare. This is also most likely where our major issue has stemmed from. Billing.
The front desk people constantly over bill us for office visits. It has happened at least three times now, and each time we explain how our insurance works and that the price of our copay/coinsurance sounds way too high for a regular office visit, they always treat my wife like she's an idiot and doesn't know what she's talking about. They're quite rude to her and so she sometimes gives in and pays way too much then I have to call and chase down a refund or speak to the office manager to get them to actually look into it, and each time we have been right. Our insurance is a 90/10 plan for primary care physician office visits (including pediatricians) and there is no deductible to be met first, we just pay a flat 10% coinsurance of whatever the cost of the office visit is. Then it's 100% covered for preventative care at the PCP. They're actually not even supposed to collect the coinsurance at the time of service as it states on our insurance card, because we have a medical reimbursement account that we use to pay for deductibles and coinsurance costs. But they always insist on collecting an "estimate" of our patient responsibility at the time of service. No problem at all. However, on a $120 office visit, they tell my wife our responsibility is $54 "according to our insurance" which they look up somehow on our insurance company's website. That's almost 50% of the cost.
Is $54 gonna make me go broke, no. But I already pay plenty to have insurance and I really don't like paying more than I have to. It's the principle. But then how they treat my wife, is totally unprofessional and she has finally had enough. Sometimes she calls me while in the office and I speak to a supervisor or billing person and they even treat us like we don't know what we're talking about and they called our insurance and that is what they told them we have to pay. Which is usually they just look at a computer and then only call when we push the matter. Oh, and we've been right every single time. We then have to wait 3 months for a refund check to come in the mail. Oh, and when I mentioned that, the office manager couldn't believe that and then tried to blame that on the insurance too for taking too long to pay them to show a credit balance on one of my 4 kid's accounts. Kind of hard to keep track of, right?
The funny thing is I have a copy of my insurance plan on my phone so my wife or I start quoting it to them and ask are they a specialist? If not, then it's 10% coinsurance. Then they say it's because we haven't met our deductible yet. Then we read them the part or show them the part about how no deductible is required to be met for PCP's. Then they treat us like we're dumb and just don't understand how insurance or medical billing works.
So long story short, after my wife paid the $54 dollars, she called me and I spoke to the office manager. After they actually called the insurance company, it was confirmed that we were right...again, and our patient responsibility was only $10. So they issued a $44 refund to our credit card, which is good they can even do that now instead of waiting for a check in the mail. The part that really really struck a nerve with my wife is when the girl who originally over charged my wife had to issue the refund, she apologized and then tried to blame the insurance company by stating that when she "called" them, she was told by "Kevin" that we had to pay the $54. The funny thing is she was standing right in front of the girl and she never made any phone calls. She just looked at her computer. So not only are they unscrupulous with their billing practices, they are dishonest about them when they get caught.
It's sad really. I bet Dr Tenby doesn't even know the extent of what his staff is doing with these billing practices. Or maybe it's just us. But this last time was the final strike. Now Dr Tenby will be losing 4 patients in one family. Maybe that doesn't matter much to them, but I hope it at least gets some responsiveness and triggers some changes because I can't imagine we're the only people that have had this happen. I believe healthcare professionals need to have much more customer service training and not be like a visit to the DMV.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)