Why- continued

Yesterday, I had a doctor’s appointment. I really wanted to avoid this appointment given the situation with the medical billing department. Not only that but it was a 40 minute drive. I was in that room for all of 15 minute after and preceding a 40 minute drive and for something I had spoken to 3 other medical professionals about.

“Do I have a co-pay?”

“Give me just one moment and I’ll look that up for you. Go ahead and take a seat.”

Five minutes later she calls me back.

“Take this, fill out both forms and return it when you’re done.”

Okay. I took the tablet, sat down, and awkwardly typed in answers about my medical history. If that had been a sheet of paper it would have taken me 2 minutes. This took 30 minutes. And I should say here, I work online. I’m an online business developer. I’m tech savvy. Filling out the paperwork wasn’t hard but it was incredibly slow by design. So I drove 40 minutes to the office, spent 30 minutes filling out paperwork, then another 15 minutes waiting in the room alone, before seeing the nurse practitioner for 15 minutes for the forth opinion on medication conflicts…why is this so convoluted?

I handed back the tablet when I was done and shortly after I was called into the room.

I pretty much knew what she was going to say. Side effects like this are very rare and blah blah blah. I just wanted to get to the next part. How can we disrupt this cycle so I’m not awkwardly puking in the sink at random? We did arrive at a plan of action, but I’d have to come back in for another visit.

Ha, of course.

So, I went back to the desk to make the next appointment.

“Do I have a co-pay? I was told by one person yesterday that I owe $5.”

“Let me check on that for you. Also, it looks like I can’t book your next appointment. You have to call the billing department. Now it says you have bad debt?”

Are you fucking kidding me? Previously, they had labeled it as “hold.” Suddenly it’s dispatching, “bad debt.” Is the billing department woman fucking with me?

Although it’s become clear that I don’t have to actually pay these bogus bills, they can prevent me from seeing my own doctors. What a load of shit is that? I’ve been double billed, wrongly billed, and these claims haven’t even been processed through insurance…they’re not doing their job correctly or not at all, yet I’m the one getting punished here.

This is time sensitive. The plan of action is for me to get on a temporary birth control before I have a chance for a tubal ligation so I don’t have to worry about hormones conflicting with my other medications at all. I’m 36. I’ve never wanted children. I’m ready to release that. But I’m also leaving the state at the end of June. If I don’t get this taken care of now, I won’t be able to do anything about it until we get to Ohio and medical care there is waaaay more expensive than it is here in Arizona. Why do medical costs vary so much? Like saline. In the hospital in Ohio it was $2,000 per liter. Here, you can get saline drips on demand for dehydration for $250 per liter. Did the hospital in Ohio accidentally add a zero to the end of the price? How corrupt is our healthcare system?

Once offices open later today, I’ll be calling back the billing department and my insurance company to attempt to sort this shit out so I can make my next doctor’s appointment. If we can’t find resolution, I have to quickly find a new doctor. I only have two and a half months to get this all straightened out.

“Do I have a co-pay?”

I asked her three times and she kept distracting me with other questions and paperwork. After I left and was well on the road it suddenly occurred to me that she never answered. shit .  What do I do now? Am I going to get yet another shitty bill? Do I need to carry a voice recorder with me everywhere? Yes, apparently I do.

The drive home was admittedly beautiful. The office is located in Marana, northwest of Tucson. The highway to get there weaves between the little mountains and the expanse of desert speckled with housing developments here and there. It was peaceful. I’m thankful that it was.