A friend asked me this week how much money Colin’s health care had cost. I had no idea. Adding up just the home health care costs and the hospice costs and the bills from some of the longer hospital stays, I already had 200,000 euros. And that’s without counting any of the bills from the countless doctor’s visits or the 500 or so euros each MRI cost and all the prescriptions. It must have been a small fortune. Perhaps I’ll count it all up some day if I’m in a place where the number seems important.
I know that the current political situation in America has left several people allergic to the word “socialism,” and I don’t want to get political, but I’ve said it many times that, even if I’m not glad about any part of the experience of the last four years – it will be four years ago next week since we first got his diagnosis – at least we did it in a social democracy where there was an adequate safety net that let us keep our house and feed ourselves and not give up every vacation day we might have had. It made a difference.
But still. Even if they’re all covered by insurance, the bills get to you.
My neighbor, the former health minister, said the bills would keep coming for ages. I kind of hoped he was wrong, but so far that’s not been the case. Last week we got the latest 15,000-euro whammy. It was the doctor’s bills from the hospice. Given that we’d already paid the hospice upwards of 50,000 euros, I’d just kind of assumed that the physician’s care was included in that. But no, the first 50,000 was all for nursing care and other services at the hospice.
Now, I don’t mind paying more money (or submitting bills to the insurance company, to be precise), because the doctors provided good care. I just kind of wish they hadn’t taken nearly half a year after his death to his us with the last bill, so that we got to do this all again. It means submitting the bill to the insurance, waiting for the money to show up and then requesting a spending limit from the bank so I can pay the bill. It’s all doable, but it’s all memories I could do without. And I’m not convinced that we’re done.
That said, there was a minor victory with the insurance company. The one company stopped providing detailed statements on reimbursements, unless they rejected the claim. But, given the amount of bills we had – and the odd way they reimbursed, breaking up some bills into components, lumping others together – I could never be sure which payments compensated me for which bills. Worse, given the volumes, I was no longer certain we had submitted every bill. Remember, there was no statement if the claim was accepted.
So, I pulled together a list of about 24 claims I wasn’t sure had been accepted. Christina needed to submit them, since the account is in her name and I could tell that Christina wasn’t 100-per-cent convinced this was the best use of everyone’s time. But submit them we did … and got 1,500 euros back. So that’s something.
And we could have stopped there, except the insurer then decided to get a little bitchy and sent us a huge stack of claims addressing all the statements about which I had questions, kind of an “Oh, you want paperwork? We’ll give you paperwork” move. Except now I’ve gone through the list again and found another handful of bills about which I still have questions. Maybe I won’t get another 1,500. And maybe I’m doing a lot better than I would be doing if this were happening in some other medical systems. Maybe I just need a better hobby. But this is what I’ve got for now, and I guess it’s better than being quiet and letting the medical system keep money to which I’m entitled.
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