Ask Jean Poole, a medical billing advocate, about her work helping people navigate the bewildering world of medical bills and insurance claims, and the stories pour out. There’s the client who was billed almost $11,000 for an 11-minute hand surgery. The cancer patient who was charged $9,550.40 for a round of chemotherapy he never received.

And then, there’s the tale of the woman who came to Ms. Poole with a large rolling suitcase stuffed with bills for her 68-year-old husband, who had gone to the emergency room after he fell getting out of bed. The hospital’s doctors discovered a series of problems — kidney failure, blood and urinary tract infections, and a blood clot. Ultimately, he ended up staying in the hospital for two months and being transferred to a nursing home for rehabilitation.

Though the couple had two insurance policies — one through Medicare and a secondary policy at Blue Cross Blue Shield — they still received more than $25,000 in medical bills and another $65,000 from the nursing home. And some of them threatened collections if they weren’t paid within days....

Read it all (another from the long queue of should-have-already-been-posted material).

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Consumer/consumer spending • Corporations/Corporate Life • Personal Finance

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