Bob

So completely out of the blue and over a year later...

Way back when, one of the labs that were processing a blood test apparently were over loaded and didn't have enough storage before doing the test, so used a third party company, in the hospital, to store the vial of blood.

That third party company, unlike most of the other companies in the hospital don't go through the centralised billing system of the hospital, this is one problem.

The second problem is, this third party company was not in our insurance network, so we had 20% of their bill to pay.

Third problem, we had moved since we had the little one and we never got the bill and it for some reason never got forwarded.

So you guessed it, they sold it to a debt collections agency who just got in touch.

Do you want to know how massively huge this debt was for them to go to the hassle of selling the debt on, rather than just eating the cost?

A whole, whoopdeupyourfluckingbungholedknobbedcheesesticks of $5.

Yup, they sold the debt over us owing them $5.

So they can sod the hell off to the bottom of the pile then

Sally Redux

Oh good grief

NatashaB

What's the cost to them of processing a check here? send them 500 checks, each for 0.01

Bob

Now that's a great idea

Wonder how many of those I can stuff in one envelope before getting overages on the post

md95065

I'm just amazed that it was only $5 ...

Even if that $5 was just the 20% that you had to pay that would still mean that the original bill was still only $25 ...

... and I swear that there is nothing in the entire US health care system that only costs $25 - I mean, they know how much the billing process alone is going to cost them so I figure that must set a lower limit of at least $50 per line item ...

Bob

So at 14 months...the little one and this bill is addressed to her, not us, is from the hospital for $600.

This is her 10% portion of the bill, because the hospital itself is in-network.

This is for her room and board, even though she was in NICU, so a shared floor, but partitioned off sections for each baby and includes her food during her stay.

It's weird that it wasn't addressed to us but her...so barely a year old and she's already in debt