C’mon, guys, you can do this!
Saturday August 01st 2009, 3:08 pm
Filed under: Life

If you remember this, I told very little of the story at the time. It involved the hospital bill, the ER physician’s bill, the offer of a discount on the hospital only if I paid it in full that month–which was what I’d called to do anyway–and I paid immediately in full on both amounts, separately. (Because while they had me on hold forever trying to decide whether they could take my money for both in the same department, the neighbor’s baby got locked in her car. I got back to them later.)

Stanford then took the discount figure, which was about five times the physician bill, wrote it up as being the physician bill, and sent it not to me but to a collection agency. I had asked for a receipt; instead I got a call out of the blue from a man who was very abusive from the get-go, demanding I not call Stanford, demanding I immediately give him my credit card and bank information, trying hard to intimidate me into immediately giving him a large sum of money that had no basis in reality.

My reasonable reaction was to think, who on earth are you, how did you get my phone number, and why on earth do you think I would be so stupid as to do that? Identity theft, pure and simple. I simply said to him I had no business with him whatsoever and hung up.  He immediately called back and launched into a tirade.

Of course I immediately called Stanford: after I’d printed out the documents proving I owed them not a thing.

Stanford admitted they’d turned it over to collections, admitted the whole thing was utterly botched, apologized, and assured me my balance was indeed zero.  Getting them to that point, however, took several phone calls and way too many hours.  The woman I got on the last go-round had the presence of mind to go and check hours later, just to make absolute sure, she said, that it stayed fixed–and it hadn’t. She fixed it again, and called me again to let me know.

Soooo…  I got a bill today.  I do expect one for the recent surgeon pre-op appointment; I didn’t get that.  We’re back at January/February.  They straightened out the discount/physician bill mixup–wasn’t that nice of them?  And charged me, yet again, for the hospital bill co-payment. We maxed out our out-of-pocket of ~$9000 for the year on that co-payment. In April. When they first sent me that bill.

And I have next week coming up…

If nothing else, this whole scenario is an example of the need to keep newspapers alive. Action Line time. I called in the big guns.



Celebrating Phyllis
Saturday August 01st 2009, 8:11 am
Filed under: Friends

Yesterday we celebrated Phyllis’s birthday. She and her husband like to scuba dive and have gone to Bali and Indonesia several times, and so we went to to a restaurant that specializes in the cuisines of both. (We didn’t manage to pull off something like this, because we’re not Phyll, but she understands.)

And if you remember this you’ll see why I thought an elephant fingerpuppet was perfect in that context for the toddler at the next table who was very well behaved for a very long time but was just starting to get a little bit bored.

What was fun was watching how much fun her parents had playing with it with her and how completely it lit up their day.  That was absolutely why I do this. It was delightful.

And to the friend who was also at Nina’s Seder (the story’s in here), who planned and helped put on my kids’ wedding receptions, (Wendy of the yellow roses helped too), the person to turn to when you need anything anytime because you know she’ll do anything for you–happy birthday, Phyllis!