25 October 2022
I had sent an email to Cat the Physician's Assistant, who will be examining Joyce this Friday, to ask if there would be a debridement. Because if there was going to be one, Joyce should take an oxycodone an hour before.
Cat wrote back to say there would be no debridement just an evaluation with a dressing change. Just take a Tylenol.
End of first update.
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JUST AFTER LUNCH, Nikita from Kaiser called to talk to us about Dignity Health's $21,029.40 billing. We both got on the line.
Nikita said Dignity Health had mistakenly billed Joyce as a commercial client. She told them Joyce was a Medicare patient and they agreed to review the billing.
She also told them it is illegal to bill a Medicare patient for covered services and she expressed surprise that Dignity Health didn't take the trouble to check Joyce's date of birth to see if, in fact, she just might be covered by Medicare.
Moreover, she said, Kaiser has a contract with Dignity Health and the billing was a breech of that contract.
They'll take 30 days to rebill, she said, but Joyce is only liable for the $105 co-pay. Which Joyce has already paid, I told her. "So the balance will be zero," she confirmed.
I asked her if she could determine whether that billing was for 20 treatments or the full 40. She had it down as 21, a billing for April only.
So if they bill us $21,029.40 again for the second set of treatments what should we do?
"Send it to me," she said.
I wrote down her name but the audio on the speaker phone is poor so I starting spelling it for confirmation. "L, E, T..."
"No, Nikita like Khrushchev," she laughed.
Indeed.