Organizing medical bills/papers?

Unclutterer ForumsWelcomeHello!

Organizing medical bills/papers?

(25 posts) (17 voices)

Started 1 year ago by Strix
Latest reply from teiltom
RSS feed for this topic

Overall Rating: 1 vote

Tags:

12 Next »

Strix
Member

I don't know where to start on this question. The paperwork associated with paying for medical services is making us crazy here.

After a medical visit, we get these papers that say, "This is not a bill." It states how much a given doctor visit should cost, and eventually an actual bill arrives. Seems like it would be easy to match things up, right? This projected expense was covered by that insurance policy? But sometimes DD and I go to the same medical center (and receive different services), where the bills are aggregated but not clearly noted (it's hard to figure out if they've billed us for all the doctor visits or just some). Or, due to differences in billing cycles, the paperwork doesn't match up.

This all came to a head when our insurance company stopped paying for services they covered last year. DH had to show that they did pay for stuff the previous year. So tedious.

Any suggestions for how to organize medical bills? How do you organize a "holding" area for the This-Is-Not-a-Bills? Then, once something is paid, do you attempt to separate it by family member? I'm thinking we should just have a small "Pending" box and then a big "Done" box.

I'm so perplexed!

Posted 1 year ago #
Demerna
Member

I scan the originals and keep jpeg & pdf copies of all old medical, insurance, vehicle, etc... bills then toss the paper copies. I file them by year and then category in case I need to find them. It is actually very easy to keep track of papers that way.

Posted 1 year ago #
suzymob
Member

I just purchased a document scanner to help organize all of our household bills & paperwork. I was thrilled when it arrived, but have been overwhelmed enough by the volume & unsure enough of how to organize & maintain the files that I haven't scanned a single piece of paper yet.

I have the same issue with multiple not-a-bill notices from the medical provider, actual medical bills and documents from the insurance company all for the same services.

Do you try to keep all documents for same services together, or do you keep the Medical bills, not-a-bills and Insurance info separate & look up each separately when/if you need to reference it?

Posted 1 year ago #
chacha1
Member

I'll bet this is an only-in-America situation. I can't believe we tolerate the for-profit insurance system. It's 100% awful.

I am extremely fortunate in that DH and I have had almost no medical bills to deal with in our married life. We have a Health Savings Account and we use the debit card from that account to pay for prescriptions, clinic visits, and co-pays.

In our few medical billing episodes, I ignored all correspondence from the insurance company until/unless I got a bill from a medical provider. Then I went through the insurance file until I found "not a bill" papers describing the service being billed. Then I went through the HSA file until I found a receipt for the point-of-service charges (if any).

Once I had things matched up I either knew that the provider was billing me for something I had already paid, in which case I sent a nice polite letter with copies of receipts, or that the provider was billing me rightfully for a portion of service that insurance didn't cover, in which case I sent a check (or debit authorization) from the HSA.

Then I clipped all that together and filed in Medical. Not in insurance or HSA because those were kind of the staging area. In Medical, it's stuff that should be *done.*

We have never come close to meeting our deductible (due to the high-deductible plans required to open an HSA), so "not a bills" go in the shredder after a couple of years. I don't need to know, two years from now, that I had $3300 left to go to meet my deductible.

Anyway that's my system, maybe it will be helpful! Sorry your insurer/primary provider is such a PITA!

Posted 1 year ago #
irishbell
Member

Medical papers are something I always keep a hard copy of, in case I can't access/print from my computer for whatever reason. I have a plastic folder with 3 or 4 folder sleeves inside. I keep all the medical and dental bills/documents/ insurance statements in that. All of them. I hate dealing with insurance issues more than any other. So many calls to find out one thing.

Posted 1 year ago #
Strix
Member

Thanks everyone for the replies! "Only in America is right." It sure is a lot of paperwork. And we have relatively few medical visits. I hate to think of people with special needs, specialists, ER visits, therapists...what must their paperwork look like?

Posted 1 year ago #
HappyDogs
Member

@strix When someone is really ill, and they don't have a coop type plan (don't know what they are called!), it is almost a full time job to keep up with the bills. I know a retired CPA who volunteers helping very ill people with their medical billing. Lots of disputed charges, lots of work and time, and she is very very good at it. She works almost full time helping only 2 or 3 folks. It really sucks when you are ill to have to deal with all that. I should ask her how she organizes it, I bet she has a great method.

I would second keeping the hardcopy, at least for 3 years. Hospitals can come back with charges quite a while later, and the original is always best. I make a file for each "illness" and just keep it for a while. Just like I do every time I get rear-ended. (I swear, does my car have a target painted on it or something?)

Posted 1 year ago #
chacha1
Member

HappyDogs, your friend might want to consider writing up her method as an e-book or publishing it on CreateSpace at Amazon. She could probably sell a lot of copies. I'd probably get one myself! Almost every American is bound to have a hideous medical billing situation at least once in their life, whether it's for them personally or a family member.

Posted 1 year ago #
Ron C
Member

My wife and I came up with a method a couple of years ago when I had some serious medical issues and we got a mountainous pile of paper. I'm working on writing it up when I stumbled on this (google search). When I finish (in a couple of days, I expect) I'll drop a link here.

It works pretty well for us, and it's very mechanical. We've since acquired a scanner and have incorporated a [mostly] paperless operation into that procedure; my writeup will cover both, since we have experiences with both.

Ron C

Posted 1 year ago #
Rosa
Member

We don't have any recurrent health problems, but we keep getting our insurance switched every year (my partner's company switches for cost) and we have had some ridiculous billing problems.

So I keep:
A calendar of appointments, medical & dental
The original co-pay receipt, which is always a full page piece of paper, all in age order (newest in front).

Any subsequent "this is not a bill/this is what we covered/you owe us money" pages get paperclipped or stapled to the original date's copay receipt.

They're not divided by person because one problem we have is that if we have back-to-back appointments, like dental cleanings, the insurance company will decide that they are being duplicately billed when they get one bill for my partner and one for my son, for the same date and procedure.

The calendar is for knowing WHAT happened on a given day - one insurer liked to send us bills with the date of service on them but not what they are/are not paying for.

And when I make a payment I shouldn't have to, because of insurer foot-dragging, I mark the calendar in red for that appointment, note the check number and amount, and make an appt on our central calendar for calling the insurer in 30 days if I haven't gotten my money from them, with the item number of the procedure I paid for from their "this is not a bill" statement that came originally.

The whole thing is just one file folder per year.

Posted 1 year ago #
needtocleanhouse
Member

Thanks for this thread. It's something I need to look in to. I'm also interested in what Ron C and his wife came up with.

Posted 1 year ago #
Ron C
Member

It's taking longer to get to writing down that I had anticipated. The steps are fairly straightforward, but I'm covering the pre-scanner and post-scanner days to help those who haven't gone paperless.

It's also a little pedantic, because we (my wife and I) need the extra rigor or we'll slip back into our normal lazy state and the paper will win.

A couple of days more and it will be ready, at least the first part of it.

Posted 1 year ago #
pkilmain
Member

Like Ron, my husband and I lived through a year when he was very ill and we were dealing with many doctors, hospitals and adjunct medical services. Fortunately we had only two insurance companies (one for each of us through our employers). That year ended up taking a full banker's box of file folders to keep everything filed. This was 2000, a time when scanners weren't common.

Now I can usually do one file folder a year, and am considering scanning the documents. What annoys me though is I never see a doctor/dentist/whoever bill until after the insurance claim has been submitted (by them) and paid! Then they send me a bill for the remainder (deductible, if any, and co-pay). Because I have double coverage, fortunately that's not much, but it makes disputing any charges a real pain. TOok me over two months to straighten out a miscoding by the insurance company....

Posted 1 year ago #
Claycat
Member

I don't even want to get into our horrible healthcare in this country, and the new healthcare system is not going to be any better. I hate insurance companies.

I haven't had health insurance for years. I can't afford it. My husband has his through work, but mine would be over $400 a month. I'm going to be 62 in a little over a year, and that will bring some relief, I hope. I'm still in debt for an emergency visit to the hospital over 3 years ago.

Posted 1 year ago #
Claycat
Member

Sorry, I got off track. Besides our own medical clutter, we have to deal with my MIL's medical clutter. She has multiple health problems, so it is a mess. I didn't have enough paper clutter of my own!

Screaming! Pulling my hair!

Posted 1 year ago #
toberead
Member

I had a serious illness last year, and keeping track of the medical bills was insane. The biggest problem I had was that I would get the "not a bill" statements that contained 3 or 4 items. Then I'd get doctor's bills that consolidated 2 or 3 visits. But they didn't match up - I might get a statement from the insurance company that contained visit 1, 4 and 6 and a doctor's bill that contained visit 1, 2 and 5. So you couldn't just match them up one-to-one.

At the time, I didn't have a scanner so I did it all in paper. I used a binder with heavy duty page protectors that hold multiple sheets, and I made copies of each bill or insurance statement as needed so I could match them up 1-to-1. Then I made notes on each one that explained what the visit was for and which doctor or service I used. Each page protector covered one event - if I had a single chemo treatment, that might include a bill from a doctor for an office visit, a bill from the hospital for the treatment itself, a lab bill for the lab tests, and a drug bill for the medication. I put a sheet of paper in each page protector that listed the services I got for that treatment and I would check them off as I got the EOB, the bill, and then paid the bill. It wasn't a perfect system but it meant I could find items quickly if needed and I could flip through and see what had been paid. Unfortunately, it was also a lot of effort to keep it all straight.

Now that I have a scanner, I'd like to scan all this in, and since it's well organized, I think I could do it fairly easily. I haven't done it yet, partly because I'd rather not think about that unpleasant experience now that it's behind me!

Posted 1 year ago #
kevindewalt
Member

Fantastic discussion everyone. I've been using David Allen's GTD for a few years and just ordered "Unclutter Your Life". I'm a software entrepreneur who started studying the topic of medical finances paperwork clutter a few months ago. Like chacha1 and others have commented, my family has been very fortunate in having good medical insurance and not having major health problems, so I wasn't aware of how AWFUL the health care system is.

A few people told me about their problems so I decided to learn more about it; it just didn't seem possible. I started interviewing people to understand what kind of problems they have and how they deal with it. At this point I've probably spent close to 100 hours talking to people, insurance companies, and others in the health care system.

I didn't appreciate the degree of needless human suffering the paperwork involved in health care finances causes people.

"Every new bill is a moment of panic"
"I got over 40 paper EOBs one month"
"I have to constantly play detective"
"My insurance company rejects each claim the first time out of policy. I only get the money when I refile"
"A doctor I didn't know started billing us. It took me two weeks of research to realize it was - allegedly - just an error. By that time it was in collections"

I started realize that there IS automation in the system, but it only serves to drive more clutter on to our dining room tables. The problems start with organization but unfortunately go much deeper; getting everything scanned and organized helps, but if we still have to read through every silly piece of paper looking for "what do I have to do?" it still takes up too much time.

Anyway, sorry for the long, rambling first post on this great discussion. I've been getting some fantastic advice and ideas from people on ways to make people's lives easier, but I'm still in learning mode.

I have some best practices I learned from people and will post them subsequently.

Great thread, thanks again those who contributed.

Kevin

Posted 1 year ago #
chacha1
Member

Hi Kevin, welcome - we will be looking forward to what you come up with! *My* story for you is a routine mole check leading to an oncology consult leading to a specialized hematology lab (not in the network of course) leading to a lab bill in excess of $1000. And NOTHING WAS WRONG.

The more I read about it all, the more I think keeping our high-deductible plan for real emergencies and just paying for pretty much everything else out of our HSA is the way to go. It's not the 100% cheapest solution but may be the simplest.

My health goal for life is to stay out of the hospital. Forever. But that's statistically improbable.

Posted 1 year ago #
kevindewalt
Member

Continuing my post above...some best practices I've picked up:

Excel and Scanning
Sad as it is, people seem to be having the most success with spreadsheets and scanning. People record the date of service in excel where they keep notes (status, paid/not paid, pending, etc.). They then scan and dump the files into records organized by date of service.

Most people organized their spreadsheets very differently depending on their life situation but almost all have the following columns:
1. Date of Service
2. Patient (if multiple in family)
3. Provider
4. "I payed" columns - copay, coinsurance, deductible
5. Insurance #1 payed from EOB
6. My balance based on Insurance #1 from EOB
7. Bill from provider
8. Final amount I payed provider
9. Notes

A couple of people sent me their spreadsheets. Feel free to email me if you want a copy, I'll have to get their permission first. kevin [at] claimaway [dot] com.

Don't take no for an answer
Painful as it is for me to say it, we're just a cost center to the health care system. I've talked to a number of people whose insurance companies reject the first claim out of standard procedure; with each subsequent claim the odds of paying go up. Others just call..and call..and call.. until the insurance company pays.

A few people told me that they feel like they ONLY get paid when the insurance company feels the cost (in call center time, reviewing claims, etc.) of not paying looks higher than the cost of paying.

Getting Help
If you find yourself getting overwhelmed with these bills consider hiring someone from ACAP to help you out. I have no financial relationship with any of them and have not used any of their services, but I have spent considerable time talking to them on how they help clients. Would be great if you could pay for services like this out of your HSA, but I don't think it is allowed.

Posted 1 year ago #
chacha1
Member

Great tips, Kevin, thanks! I'll add a piece of advice (that I hope to follow myself) - get into the habit of tracking this information BEFORE you have a real health issue. Then you'll have the tools all set up and won't have to think about it when you have other concerns.

Posted 1 year ago #

12 Next »

Reply »

You must log in to post. If you do not already have an account, you can register here.