No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Most (all?) health insurance companies in USA have clauses in their agreements with in-network providers (ie doctors, hospitals, pharmacists) to permit a covered patient to first receive the Explanation Of Benefits (EOB) document from the insurance company first, before having to pay a provider. In fact, waiting for the EOB is highly advisable, because paying a provider's bill in-full and then later having to obtain a refund because the insurer paid out is akin to pulling teeth (that is, painful and difficult).
The EOB also shows which claims the provider actually filed with the insurance company, which if full-and-complete means you should not expect to make any further payments for services received.
To be clear, the EOB also includes any amount which the covered patient is known to have paid at the time of service. For example, most in-network doctor's offices will charge the insurance policy's copay on-the-spot before seeing the doctor, since this is a known, fixed amount and insurance will pay the doctor some sort of negotiated remainder.
You should verify the EOB reflects any copays you've already paid, and that the costs have accrued toward whichever deductible applies to you -- more than one deductible can be at play.
To answer your question directly, I would not start any negotiation until you have the EOB in hand, because otherwise you are negotiating blind: you won't know which claims have been filed, and you won't know how much insurance has agreed to already pay.
Thank you for your response. I will be reading the links you provided!
I mostly do that but I have to tell you its a fight every time as even the reasonable places expect the bill to be paid like a week after they bill you. So they take 3 weeks to do the claim and bill you and they don't recognize the insurance company will take 3 weeks to process the claim formally and they certainly don't want to give you the curtesy of taking 3 weeks to compare the bill to the eob and send out the payment. Again this is the reasonable ones as many places insist on a credit card being put on file and maybe they have an agreement but I have literally been ghosted by providers if I refuse to put one down. So they technically are not requiring it but they are. Oh and to boot they mention if they charge you wrong it is fine because they will just refund you. Which means if you use an hsa debit card and they charge it and then refund you well they just basically acted as your money laundering agent for tax evasion. The US is wack.
My limited experience with provider bills is that even two months "late", none have ever referred the bill to collections. Nor did they ever charge the "late" fees that their bills had threatened. I've never come across a provider that demanded a credit card on file -- and chargebacks would ensue if they did run the card without notifying me -- but my experience certainly won't be a consistent across the country.
I'm not sure what you mean about the part involving tax evasion, but broadly speaking: if a card is going to be held on file -- whether for a rental car or something else -- debit cards are not advisable. Also, my cursory understanding is that HSA cards should only be used for point of sale transactions, since apparently it could sometimes be declined for card-number-entered transactions.
Its a bit like the law that is on the books but not enforced. Until it is and the problem with using another credit card is now you are taking out of your regular savings when you specifically have saved for medical issues from a pool that is not being used for that. Its not great.
As an aside, regarding USA health care public policy, I think provider-issued bills need to be abolished, where the only bill that insured patients receive is a single, consolidated bill that comes from the insurance company, at the same time the EOB is sent, with plentiful payment and financing options.
Not only does this reduce patient confusion, it saves money for providers (who don't need to follow-up on late payments), it reduces the need for providers to issue refunds, and patients benefit because it's a single bill at the end. The only downside -- maybe -- is that forgiveness of a medical expense must file paperwork with the insurance company, to be reflected on the consolidated bill. But this would still be a massive improvement.
Or, instead, maybe just go the full shilling and have a national, single-payer, universal health care system. Baby steps or big leaps; take your pick.