I got home from work last night to discover that Jakobe had put off paying his doctors bills long enough that they were in collections. I was livid. It's not like we don't have the money to pay the bills, it's more that he kept telling me that he would take care of it, and that he wants to show me how I can trust him to handle things. Yesterday was a big step back on that front. I do not gain confidence when you let things slide that far. He gets points for taking care of it before going to work this morning, but I still wish that he did it months ago. I'd rather fight with the insurance company trying to get reimbursed than go to collections.
All of this isn't to say that it hasn't happened to me - it has, and I hated it. We all let things slide from time to time, but I'd been reminding him to take care of it for at least a month and getting reassurances that he was on top of it.
Enough bitching.
This all leads into the fear. I'm afraid of the whole money part of infertility treatments. I'm not going to let it stop us, and we should be able to swing it, given time, but being responsible for huge bills hanging over our heads doesn’t sound like much fun to me. Plus - Jakobe tends to "put away" bills when he's cleaning. and that could mean he put them in a random pile somewhere else in our house (Sometimes the storage room) and then I can't find them. I appreciate that he's trying to keep the house neat, because we aren't the neatest people, but there's a point where it goes too far.
Because we see different doctors, and have different insurance, the only thing that I can do on his side of things is try to keep an eye out for the bills. I have to rely on him to try to talk his insurance into paying, or to work out things like that. I'm afraid that we'll end up paying for more than we have to because he doesn't know how to get things covered, or he doesn't want to spend the time jumping through the necessary hoops. He already hates the doctor, and the dentist, and so doesn't tend to deal with things until they're an emergency.
Posts
So many times I've wished that there was a company that I could hire to handle medical bills, They are the worst. So complicated and confusing - and i get so emotional just looking at them, much less trying to sort them all out. More often than not, my lover ends up having to actually write the check, because it just makes me so sick.
ReplyDeleteI have however taken over the organization of our infertility bills and medical records. And it has paid off too, with the insurance actually covering a few thousand dollars after I resubmitted bills that were missing basic information. I just posted all of our costs on my blog, so anyone else can see what we are paying and compare.
I hadn’t really thought about posting our costs on the blog. I think that’s a great idea – it helps others get an idea of what to expect. Besides, in my head (even though I know it’s probably not true) I often think that other people going through this have a lot more money or resources than we do.
ReplyDelete