Last June, Witten had a procedure done to make sure that he wasn't still having urinary reflux issues that were caused by his early birth. We really went back and forth on paying for this procedure because they quoted $1100, and it was just a checkup to see if he was still at risk. (They didn't actually work to correct anything, but rather just wanted to see if it was still an issue.) We weighed the pros and cons to going forward with the procedure because we had just changed insurance companies, and would be footing the entire bill ourselves. Eventually, the fear of possibly causing harm to our child outweighed the price tag, and we agreed to go in. What they failed to mention was that the quoted price was just the hospital fees. There would be many more high bills that came in for this procedure. And, as you would expect, Witten was given a clean bill of health. Not that I wanted my first born to be afflicted with something as potentially painful as this, but, nobody wants to pay approximately $2000 for someone to tell them that there's nothing wrong, and that you didn't need to spend all of that money.
In the course of paying one of those doctor's bills, we somehow ended up paying twice. A mistake that I only noticed because I went back to check our statements months later, in September, and found. We promptly called Cook Children's to see why we were charged twice for the same amount on the same day. We eventually realized that while the girl that Mitch was talking to when he paid by phone was processing the payment, they had a slight power blip, and she assumed the payment hadn't gone through...SO...she put it through again. Honest mistake...or at least we'll tell ourselves that. :) That brings us back to the phone call...in September. When I called and talked to a lady there, she said that she got it all straightened out, and that we should expect a check in 6-10 weeks. To me, that seemed like quite a long time, but we weren't in dire need for the cash, so I told her ok and hung up the phone.
Today is June 7th. It's almost a year to the day of when this procedure was performed. Two days ago, I remembered this check and got the strange feeling that we had never received the money. Of course, I was in the throws of teaching a pretty challenging group of 7th graders, so my memory wasn't too reliable. That being said, I asked Mitch to call and check up on them. I printed off the statement complete with highlighted portions and notes of what to say. When I talked to him that evening, he said that they didn't have any record of a phone call made in September, but they did record that we had called just a couple of weeks ago at the end of May, and due to that phone call, they had just processed the claim, and we should be receiving our check soon.
Um...what?!? We didn't make a call 2 weeks ago. I haven't spoken to them since September. This sounds like a case of someone losing our paperwork, finding it 8 months later, and fudging the date in a CYA attempt. Oh well. Oddly enough, we received a check for $407.50 in the mail yesterday. I thought it was ironic that the day after we called, the check showed up.
It's funny how when companies are waiting for you to pay them, you can't get the money to them fast enough. However, when heaven forbid, they make a mistake, it takes a year to straighten it out....
Now, if we can just get our $95 check from the pool company who fixed our pool back in March.
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