I shouldn't complain...

For the most part, my health insurance has been wonderful. And I sort of feel bad about getting so irritated at the hiccups that have happened. But I'm frustrated.

The very first bill I received related to Marty's accident was the ambulance bill. I quickly filled in the information they would need to submit it to the insurance company and sent it back. That was over three months ago. About three weeks ago, I again received that bill. And another the next week too. It had been denied by the insurance company. Sort of. My insurance is out of Maryland. But I don't live in Maryland, so all claims first go through their counterpart in North Carolina before going on to my insurance company (this is important later too). It got denied by North Carolina, so it never made it on the radar of Maryland. And the reason it got denied...they said Marty wasn't covered on my policy. (Tricky of me to get him covered by the time he got to the hospital). Turns out the ambulance company had mis-entered Marty's birthdate in their database. Fortunately, this has mostly been taken care of and I can go on ignoring the bills they may continue to send.

Next issue. We have good medical benefits, but we actually don't have dental coverage--except if it's as a result of an accident. Which all of Marty's dental visits have been. Except one time I guess someone filing the claim forgot to explicitly say this, so that claim got denied too. Again, fortunately this is being resolved between the provider and insurance company.

But here's the thing that's really bothering me today. Nearly 2 months ago Marty got new glasses. Again, not something that would normally be covered on our policy, except in the case of accidents. We didn't realize it would be covered until after we'd already paid for them, I filed a claim. That was over a month ago. Yesterday I called to check on the status of that claim. No record of it. Oh yeah, and I was supposed to submit it to North Carolina, not Maryland. I was told that maybe I should go back to where we got the glasses and see if they would go ahead and submit it for me since he'd looked up and found that they are a "participating provider"--it might go through faster that way. So I went back. No doing. Apparently the doctor is a particpating provider, but the actual glasses-selling people are not. Today I worked on figuring out where I need to send this claim if I'm supposed to submit it to North Carolina (because of course no one I spoke to yesterday could tell me that). I managed to get hung up on about 3 times by their automated system, and then when I got a real person, I had to be transfered 3 times and explain the situation that many times before anyone could even tell me where I need to send the darn claim. (Fortunately I had copies of the original claim and receipt that vanished). And now I suppose I'll wait another 6-8 weeks before it can actually get processed by North Carolina and sent on to Maryland for them to send me a check--unless of course it gets lost again. Or denied.