My wife and I used a midwife practice to have our children (prenatal care, labor/delivery, aftercare). It's a midwife/OBGYN practice associated with a hospital (not like in-home birth midwives), so it works with insurance. They calculate a cost based on your health insurance and have you pay in advance. When we got pregnant with our second child a little over two years later, we went back to the midwives and discovered that they had roughly $1000 credit in our name. They had overcharged us by that much once everything was calculated and insurance provided their funds after our delivery. But they never even tried to tell us they had $1000 of our money for two years. Okay, no big deal, we were having another child so we just applied that money to our new contract. But now we knew to check in later.
After our second child was born, we knew to check in and see if they owed us any refund. This time they overcharged about $300. We've been calling about every other week since October. They use some sort of third-party company for financials and always give us the runaround, saying they've made requests but there is nothing they can do. They are very unfriendly. We've talked to their in-house financial people as well as their office manager. They often "forget" that we've called and say we never did or claim they never told us things. We're not desperate for the money; it's more of the principle of the thing. Also, since they don't actively inform people they overpaid, how much other people's money are they sitting on??
Anyway, I'm kind of not clear about my options. One thought I have is to write them a certified letter outlining our previous phone requests and requesting our funds. At least this creates a paper trail. I also wonder if my insurance company could take care of this; maybe they have policy about overbilling people but also taking insurance money? Or maybe a lawyer to write a letter for us on letterhead? Is there something else we should do? It's a bummer; we've loved the midwives' services, but hated their business-side.
Submitted February 07, 2018 at 08:32AM by kazba http://ift.tt/2Eqachm
