Well, I just paid what should, hopefully, be our last gigantic bill for Colin’s health care. In a fair world, it would be the last bill ever, but I can’t shake the worry that the hospital will surprise us in a few months with 800 euros for the MRI they forgot to tell us about or, what I truly fear, a backlog of quality surcharges, since they forgot to add one to the 16.32-euro bill.
Because it was a bill to our home health care, it was annoying. It took them several tries to get us an accurate bill. Then they wanted payment in about five days. It took us significantly longer than that to get the paperwork filed to the insurance and then to get the money back. Even then, I had hoped to pay the bills last night, and then my bank’s website had some kind of meltdown, so here I am, paying bills and blogging about it in the few stolen minutes I have between shoving the kids out the door in the rain to school and heading out to work myself.
I thought there would be a bit more satisfaction to being done with that bill. But, in the end, it’s just another chore in what is on most levels a normal middle class life. I didn’t live out any of my revenge fantasies like leaving a nasty message in the notes section or hand-delivering the payment in 2-cent pieces (The final bill was 18,361 euros: one has to be practical about these things). It’s just done and hopefully we’ll never hear from these people again. Hell, given the mess that company is in, there’s no guarantee that there will be someone still running the place to receive the money.
For now, it will be odd to, for the first time in a long time, have our bank account filled with only our money from our salaries, not with loads of funds sloshing between the insurance and the providers. Honestly, I’ve never quite understood why I have to be the middleman in this, why the insurer can’t just pay the providers directly. But that’s the system.
Whichever, I don’t believe that was truly the last bill. But I guess only time will tell.
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