Rant #2,387: Doctor's Orders

Yesterday was not like Monday for me.

As I described in the previous Blog entry I wrote, Monday was full of suprrises.

Tuesday was less so.

I barely ventured outside, did what I had to do in the house, and had a pretty quiet day.

One odd thing did happen.

For some reason, all of a sudden, my family and I have been getting a lot of doctors' bills that need to be paid.

I get that; they provide their services, and for those services, they need to be reciprocated with our money.

No problem. Write a check, the bill is paid.

But for some reason, since just before the coronavirus hit, we have been pummeled with one bill after another that yes, has to be paid, but also yes, is wrong in what we are being charged for these services.

Currently, I have one major bill of more than $1,000 that I have paid, but I feel that I was wrongly charged for. Not the bill, but the price of the bill.

I even went to the Better Business Bureau site, made a complaint, and that complaint, or so I have been told, is being looked at by the upper regions of the organization that I complained about.

This has been going on for two months, and have yet to hear anything one way or the other--other than the BBB wrongly said, in an email, that I had settled with the doctor, which I had not, and I promptly told them to reopen the case, which I hope they did.

Other bills we have paid, but told we haven't paid them; one time we paid a bill, the payment was mixed up with another payment for another bill from the same doctor, and my check was actually canceled by the doctor's office--yes, they wrote canceled on the actual paper bill--without my permission.

They acknowledged the mistake, and actually let me slide on a payment because of their ineptitude.

The latest doctors' bill gaffe happened recently, where we paid a bill, paid it in cash during a personal visit briefly before the coronavirus struck, have a receipt for out payment, but we were since told that we never paid the bill.

Since I have the receipt in hand, when I received notice in the mail that we owed this money, I knew a mistake had been made, called the office, and yesterday, they finally called back, telling me to simply send them a scan of the receipt, and once they had it, everything would be hunky dory.

So I scanned the receipt, and promptly sent it to them, but the first email address they gave me was incorrect, so it bounced back. It is a long address, so it is possible that I copied it down wrong, but it is equally as possible that they gave it to me incorrectly.

Whatever the case, I sent the receipt back to them using the correct address, and asked them to respond to me that they received the email and that everything was copacetic.

Just a little while later, I received an email from them with this exact message:

"Thank you.  His account is not paid in fill."

Hmmm ... why the heck not?

I proved to them that the bill in question was paid for, in cash, right then and there when we had an office visit. What is the problem?

So I emailed back to them the following response:

"You mean "paid in full," correct?"

And a little while later, they responded to me:

"YES TYPO."

So what was the original response, a Freudian slip?

Look, I realize that our medical professionals are being taken to the bone now with the coronavirus present, but this doctor has nothing to do with the fighting of that virus, and, in fact, the last time we "saw" him was through a phone call appointment ... so what is the problem?

And to not say "sorry for the error" makes them even more suspect.

Do they know what they are doing? Has the coronavirus maybe not taken over their body, but has the very thought of the virus taken over their minds?

Yes, I have given them some slack--a lot of it, in fact--but I have lately seen so many bill errors related to the doctors that we use that I have to question whether they are more interested in the virus than they are of me when I have an appointment.

And as I said, I am still waiting on the verdict on that $1,000 bill, a verdict that isn't coming any time soon. I had actually been in contact with someone at that organization, and he kept on telling me a decision was coming, that I had to wait because of their other concerns, which I certainly understood, but this is going on for months now, and it keeps on getting pushed back to the point, as I had mentioned, that the BBB themselves thought it was a done deal.

Not so, not so.

Look, you might be saying to yourself, "What is he crabbing about?" in lieu of the bigger picture of what is going on in the world right now as we speak.

But the fact of the matter is that I am unemployed, have been so go more than six months, and when I am forced to go into my savings to pay a doctor's bill that I know is unjust, I have to say something.

And I did, and I hope to hear from the organization handling this soon. Last week, they told me to give it two weeks, so if I do not hear from them by next week, I will be calling the new person I am dealing with, and calling his cell phone number, which he gave me.

Beyond doctors' bills, I think we all need to take a deep breath right now, me included.

We are going to beat this thing, one way or the other, and we cannot let it cloud our minds and make us crazy and inept in what we are doing.

The recent rash of incorrect doctors' bills has forced me to examine each bill I get line to line, to make sure that I am paying the right amount for the services rendered.

Lately, that has not been the case.

Is there some black cloud hovering over me, or have others had the same problem that I have, since the coronavirus struck?

I don't know, but what I do know is that the presence of this virus has not yet upset my eyes or my mind, and when I see a bill that doesn't add up, coronavirus or not, I am going to have what to say about it.

And as an aside--and really the most important thing I have to say today--I know of at least one more person who has the disease, and possibly two other people who have been hit by it, one who has recovered and another who is going through it right now.

One is a childhood friend who I have known off and on for more than 50 years, and I hope that he has a speedy recovery. He is a good person, a real family fan, and he needs to get better quickly.

The other two are part of my family, and part of the same family, and one, the husband, had the symptoms of the disease for weeks before he recovered on his own, the other, the wife, just got hit and is suffering at home.

I am happy that the one person has seemingly recovered on their own, and the other also needs to recover as quickly as possible, but she might have a bit of a road ahead of her, since she only became sick like three or four days ago.

So yes, in the grand scheme of things, my complaints are truly negligible when talking about these people I just mentioned, who are going through a horrible time now.

I am sure they will all recover.

And that recovery is truly "doctor's orders."