An Overview of the Day of Gah

That last post was kind of an "argh, I have to get this off my chest RIGHT NOW" kind of post, which was probably pretty obvious. Sorry about that, I like to write slightly more thought-out posts usually, but today was a frustrating day.

To recap: the nurse got my new insurance info, and sent it to the records department, who never updated the info. In the morning I was upset about not being more assertive and asking them for their timeline on getting my surgery pre-auth finished so that I could plan for either having it on Monday or waiting for two weeks. But then the nurse called and had me re-send the insurance info so she could send it straight to the pre-auth department and get the ball rolling.

Then this afternoon the financial department called and were much more helpful than the ORM financial person was. They told me that my out-of-pocket for the surgery (not including anesthesia) is going to be about $1350. (I think it's exactly $1346.50 or something.) She said $1000 of that is my deductible, and the rest of it is 20% of the total. That was a little bit of a blow, since ORM quoted me $2000 out of pocket and for an extra $550 or so I would have already had the procedure done. But then my coworker reminded me of another benefit that we have, which reimburses us for the first $750 of our deductible. So even though it's still not going to be fun to pay, at least it'll only be just under $600 (plus whatever I have to pay for anesthesia), which is way better than $2000.

So things ended on a better note than they started. The preauthorization has been received by the insurance company, and hopefully they'll be able to process it by the end of Thursday. With any luck, I'll be moving onward on Monday!