Seething HATE (Another In An Ongoing Series)

Shelby had her surprise hospital adventure almost a year ago, and we're still dealing with bills and paperwork stemming from the experience.

The billing office of the cardiologist who treated Shelby is resolutely convinced that we owe them $339.00. Our insurance says that not only has the cardiologist been paid, they've been overpaid, and that we don't owe them a cent. The $339 figure comes out of a mistake on the billing office's part — the cardiologist is a member of our insurer's network, but the billing office billed it as an out-of-network claim, which dramatically upped our initial 'patient responsibility'.

Our insurer has supposedly transmitted voluminous details about their claim revisions to the billing office. They say they've sent multiple dunning letters requesting their money back. Two insurance reps that I spoke with took down the billing office's phone number and our account info, promising to call and intervene on our behalf. Now our case has grown too complex for the first-line telephone support people to deal with; it's been whisked away for review at a higher level.

On the other side, to hear them tell it, the billing office is poor, unloved and misunderstood. They claim that they haven't heard anything from our insurer for months and months. Nobody's called. They've never received anything to contradict or countermand our initial $339 worth of 'responsibility'. (They claim that they spoke with someone at our insurer who said that yes, we did owe $339, but mysteriously, that person has no name; other supporting details were likewise hazy.) Why, they didn't even cause the initial billing mixup that's put us into months of he-said, she-said hell — must've been something they did wrong over at the insurance company!

I don't know what we're going to do, but we're going to have to Do Something pretty soon. Our $339 charge has been slowly marching across the bottom of the monthly bills that the cardiologist's been sending — at first, 'Current', then '30-60 Days', '60-90 Days', '90-120 Days', and now 'Over 120 Days'. I don't want them to throw this into collection and possibly mess up our credit, but $339 is a bit much just to make them go away.

Maybe this is just a business maneuver on the cardiologist's part; the last couple of times that I sparred on the telephone with the billing office's representative — imperturbable, unhelpful, and unshakably convinced of her complete and total infallibility — I've come away feeling like I need a cardiologist.