You can follow all the steps suggested in last week’s column to protect against medical billing mistakes – and prevent many from occurring – but still find that some bills are incorrect.  Examples of some errors recently found in my husband’s and my doctor’s bills illustrate some types of problems to watch out for. 

In three cases, doctors’ offices cashed the checks I sent (totaling nearly $500), but didn’t credit our accounts.  These are among the easiest mistakes to fix.  Find copies of the cancelled checks or credit card charges.  Call or write to the doctor or billing office, and describe (on the phone) or enclose (in a letter) the details about the payments made, including the endorsements made on the back of the check, if any, to help show that the money did actually make it into the doctor’s account.  Usually, this will solve the problem.

In another case, a clinic posted two identical charges for $360 for the same service on the same date, when the service had been performed once.  It took quite a while on the phone for the billing clerk to understand the problem:

“Are you saying you never got this service on this date?”

 “No, I’m saying that while I did get this service on this date, I didn’t get it twice!”  

In such a case, ask that the billing records be compared to the clinical records (which detail what the doctor did). In this case, the billing clerk did not have access to the clinical records, so she turned the problem over to a special department set up to research billing errors.  (Think about that!)  Within a few days, I got a call back saying that they agreed with my conclusion; they removed the duplicate charge.

In four cases, a doctor’s office charged as if I had received multiple allergy shots on the same day when I had gotten only one.  When people get multiple related services in one visit, insurers pay less than they would if the services had been delivered in separate visits; nevertheless, the pay is more than it would be if the patient had gotten only one service. 

In these four cases, the health care workers giving the shots hadn’t written down on the billing worksheet how many shots I had gotten (probably because I had gotten only one). The billing people saw that they had previously billed for two shots, and assumed that I had gotten two shots on all future visits.

Here as well, asking the billing people to compare the clinical records to the billing records resulted in quick agreement to submit revised bills to my insurer.

Next week’s column offers more examples of billing errors and how to fix them.