Medical Insurance Nightmare Update

I have some exciting news for all of you who have been following my medical insurance dilemma. For those of you who are not familiar with it... this is a short synopsis:

In April 2008 my entire family got tested for the ATP7B gene since my daughter had been recently diagnosed with Wilson's Disease in February 2008. This is a very rare genetic test and so I had no idea what to expect. The results were good...we were all carriers and did not have the defect. However, my nightmare began when I received the bill for each of the six members of my family. The bills were in the thousands for each test. I just knew that there was a billing error. Since we couldn't afford to pay the bills and then have reimbursement our bills went to collections. The lab blamed the insurance company and the insurance company kept blaming the lab. I spent countless hours on the phone with each trying to solve the mix-up. However, it seemed to get worse with time. I was just about to give up when one day I was taking a shower and thought to myself, "why don't I just call the lab and find out how much the test is supposed to cost?" I did just that! To make a looooong story short, I was able to find out that indeed the testing was not supposed to be as much as they billed me and the lady was able to take our bills out of collections. I spent another three months calling up the insurance company and the billing office at the lab to make sure that our bills were not placed in collections once again.

The update is as follows: our bills came in today and our balance is (drum roll please......) ZERO!!!! I am so glad that I never gave up. I knew that the time I spent on the phone with the representatives would pay off. In the meantime, I got a Case Manager for my daughter and I will write more about that later. This person will basically be my advocate if anything like this happens in the future. The way things are looking right now with the health care mess.... I will definitely need an advocate.
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Let us pray that the government does
not make things worse than they already
are.
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