A Lesson Learned

For about a year now, I have read several articles about checking your hospital bills against your Explanation of Benefits statements (EOB's) because hospitals are notorious for overcharging patients for services that they did not receive or not filing claims according to insurance guidelines or just flat out overcharging for services that the patients did receive.

I didn't pay any attention to the bills when it came to Asher being born. I just counted on everyone doing their jobs with integrity and leaving it at that.

Since getting pregnant with Lucy, all of that has changed.

One of the reasons was because my OB office told me that we owed them $249 that were charges left over from Asher. Then, overnight that changed to they owed us $190, to "we applied that money to your deductible so no, you can't get a check back." It was bizarre and my head is still swimming over what happened with our money.

So, I have very meticulously kept all of our EOB's and all of the statements that we have received from the hospital so that once I received the final bill, I could verify what we owed.

The hospital is pretty tricky because they have sent us around 78 statements in the last four months and all of them have unbelieveably different patient balances. One says, $7534.28 and one says $46.37. You have no idea at any time what the bottom line is. It is very confusing.

But basically I have not paid any attention to the balances. The most important documents to keep up with are your EOB's. Every single EOB has a box that says "Patient Responsibility" and that is what you owe, not what the hospital says you owe.

So today, we received a statement from the hospital that was all related to Lucy being born. So I pulled out all of the EOB's and pulled out the calculator and started doing some math. Wanna know what I found out?

Mission Hospital is overcharging us by at least: $656.99

Yeah, that's a lot of cheddar.

Our latest bill, which does include our ER visit in January is: $1358.86 Our EOB's state that we owe: $701.87. Quite a difference.

So I called our insurance and said, I just want to check my numbers. They said I was right. So I called the hospital and they said, "We don't have any kind of agreement with your insurance for these discounted charges. So we charged you full price. You are responsible for all of these charges."

When I called my insurance office back, they were all, "WHAT? Oh no. We are gonna take care of this." Watch out Mission. My insurance lady is gonna kick yours to protect mine. YEOW!

The lesson here. Double check! I have about 15 line items on this statement and I checked all of my EOB's against it. Some of the charges are off by only $3.00--but it adds up to real money. Some of the charges, like DELIVERING A CHILD are off by $500. Unbelieveable. I am so glad that I checked and haven't paid anything yet. Cause I can promise you, that hospital would not be sending me a refund check. Crap heads.