You received a bill from a lab?

What to do if you received a bill from a lab for services rendered at Family Care, PA.

If you are reading this, you probably received a bill from a lab and had a question, so you were directed to this blog post for answers. There are a few pieces of information you’ll want to collect before determining if the bill is accurate.

Check the Explanation of Benefits (EOB) letter from your Insurer. For any claim against your health insurance, you will receive a statement of benefits from your insurer after the claims has been processed. This is an insurance-side verification document to be sure you are being billed the proper amount from the rendering facilities. This document also explains why something wasn’t covered – in many cases, the reason is something that can easily be fixed once you review the explanation and compare the result to your plan’s details.

Seriously, check your EOB. This step answers 90% of the questions by itself and helps answer the other 10% much faster. Please take the time to find and evaluate a paper or electronic copy of this document before asking questions or paying a bill.

  • Check statement dates. If your EOB shows the claim was processed after the bill was generated, you may receive an updated bill to reflect the changes.
  • Check denial codes. If something wasn’t covered, the EOB will tell you why. If you disagree with the reason and think it should have been covered differently, you still have a chance to fix or appeal the denial. If the denial reason makes sense, you’ll likely owe that amount.
  • Check each line item. Often, large bills are the result of a single, uncovered service, among a set of otherwise covered services. Narrow your focus on the specific line items that need to be fixed in your appeal.

If your insurer does not have record of the claim (eg. there is no EOB), then the lab did not file your claim with your correct insurance. You will need to contact the lab to update your insurance information and have them re-file the claim.

Find the portion of the EOB that states your patient responsibility. Based on the denial reasons stated in your EOB, we may have the potential to appeal and/or re-file your claim to have it re-processed by your insurer. If you think there is something that should have been paid, this annotated portion of your EOB will give you a clue as to why the service was denied. From there, we have a few options. In order of most likely, here are a few of the common situations we encounter:

Amount applied to deductible.

This probably means the reason/diagnosis used for the testing was not considered a preventive code. If your bill shows a primary diagnosis code starting with a Z, it was probably filed as preventive. If not, many plans have a lab deductible to meet prior to covering non-preventive services. If you believe the service should have been considered preventive, read this information regarding preventive wellness services and/or check your insurer’s benefit package to verify potential coverage.

Coinsurance owed.

Even after you meet your deductible, many plans still have a coinsurance percentage that will apply to lab services. Instead of paying 100% prior to meeting your deductible, you will pay a smaller portion (usually 10% or 20%) until you reach your out-of-pocket maximum. Basically, if your insurer allows $10 for a service, you can expect to pay $1. If you have not yet met your out-of-pocket maximum, you should expect to owe some amount for all non-preventive services.

Non-covered services.

This service is not considered a part of your insurer’s benefits package. This is rare, but it does happen. In certain cases, mostly regarding lab procedures, the lab and/or your provider may not be allowed to bill you for non-covered services. Always contact the rendering provider of any non-covered service within 2-3 weeks of receiving your EOB to verify your claim’s status to be sure. For services that are ultimately considered non-covered and billable, we can potentially have you pay our uninsured prices, rather than paying the lab directly.

Still have questions?

If you have gone through these steps and still have questions, we would be glad to help! Please include a copy of your EOB, a copy of the bill you received from the lab, and any information you have learned so far from your discussions with your insurer and the lab. This information will be needed to solve whatever complication you’re having with your claim. Good luck!

Appeal Denial, a Play in 4 Acts

The transcript below is a real email conversation I had with a patient who was trying to appeal a denied service. Reading this might help you avoid some of the delays we had with the appeal denial process and give you some direction on the steps you need to take if you want to file a claim appeal. The example refers to CPT Code 93880, which is a CIMT test performed at our office and often denied by out-of-state health insurance companies. You can potentially adapt the conversation to any CPT code, service, and price, as the process is very similar for appealing almost any denied service.

If you have any questions, please contact Ryan!

The Appeal Denial Begins (Act 1)

ME: We just received a denial for your CIMT test from February stating it was a “non-covered service” on your plan. That is the only information we received on our end – would you possibly be able to share the information on your statement with me so I can figure out if there is anything we can do for the appeal denial? Depending on why they determined it to be “non-covered,” we may have a few options available to get it covered. Thanks!

PATIENT: How much is it if it isn’t covered? I could dig into it a bit more, but if it’s hundreds of dollars, I’ll be extra motivated. 🙂 Are they usually covered by patients’ coverage?

ME: Yeah, it is usually covered. I was surprised to get the denial. It was $198.65, so it’ll probably be worth trying. I kind of enjoy trying to win these appeals, so I hope you’ll give it a shot! 🙂

PATIENT: I’d love to give it a shot! I’ll put that $200 to much better use. Is there any information I can send along in the meantime? I have had poor cholesterol and my family has a history of heart disease. The test revealed some unfortunate news about my “arterial age” and led to a cardiologist visit. Does that help my case? 🙂

ME: Your EOB from your insurance will probably have more details – I have attached the version I received on my end. Can you see what details yours shows? I’m not sending you an invoice since I think we can get it covered, but I can if that might help. A letter of medical necessity is one of the last options we have for an appeal, so that information should help if we get to that point. Hope it is easier than that, but we’ll see what your EOB says and go from there. Thanks!

Eight Weeks Later (Act 2)

PATIENT: Still no EOB in the mail. I wonder if I’ll ever get anything. Could we move forward in some other way?

ME: Do you possibly have electronic-only EOBs enabled? Can you login to an account with your insurance and look at your claims?

PATIENT: Good thoughts. I do have access to my online account and there is an EOB in there! I attached it. There’s not much more in there, unfortunately. What can I do to help this effort?

ME: You may need to call them to get a better reason why it was considered non-covered. Sometimes, they just accidentally call it non-covered and as soon as you try to ask them why, it magically gets fixed immediately. The EOB is good to have if we’re filing an appeal, though, so that can be your proof of a denied claim (one of the three things they’ll probably need to initiate an appeal). I know it’s a hassle, but it’s really helpful to have an actual reason why it is non-covered before trying to submit anything just so we don’t run into the same problem after an appeal.

Someone at your insurer’s customer service department should be able to answer this question: “Why was CPT Code 93880 considered a non-covered service under my plan?” The process for an appeal denial is pretty much the same no matter what, but we’d give them different content depending on why they claim its non-covered. I hope that helps!

PATIENT: Great, thanks Ryan! I’ll give them a call soon and ask that exact question. I’ll be in touch.

Two Weeks Later (Act 3)

ME: Just an update to let you know BCBS requested all records related to the CIMT service. I just sent them about 20 pages worth of notes your provider thought were relevant, so we’ll see how they respond in about 4 weeks. You should get a long letter in the mail if it is denied again, or a short letter if they approve it. Your letter usually arrives about 2 weeks before ours, so let me know which you get and I can start fixing the new outcome a little sooner.

PATIENT: That’s great! Thank you for staying on top of this, Ryan. I have so much else to do during the day, I’ve been kicking the “call BCBS” can down the road. It sounds like they’re still in the process of determining whether it should be covered. I appreciate it, as always.

Three Months Later (Act 4)

ME: Have you heard anything yet? I received a appeal denial saying it was duplicate (meaning they didn’t change their mind about it being non-covered) a few weeks ago, but nothing else. Did you happen to get a full explanation of the appeal’s denial? Thanks!

PATIENT: Huh… you know, I never received anything more in the mail, and I never checked back up on my dashboard. I’m doing that now…Okay, done looking it up. It does look like I have 2 outstanding claims and I owe ~$200, but that seems lower than I recall it being. Both are for “Vascular Study.” Let me know if there’s any more info I can get you. I should probably pay this dang claim if I haven’t already.

ME: That kind of confirms what I got – just hoping for better news from you. I’ll send you an invoice so you can use your flex card to pay the balance. Thanks for the reply!

How do I know if I am being billed the correct amount for my visit?

How do I know if I am being billed the correct amount for my visit?

As most people can understand, figuring out exactly how much a particular medical service will cost can be extremely difficult. There are a lot of variables that factor in to the final cost of any care you receive, but it is still possible to get pretty solid information and set reasonable expectations for the most common types of services you will encounter. This post is designed to help you understand the basics of the billing process to help you identify any problems and know learn how to fix them.

When you are billed by any medical provider, they are usually working with the best possible information they can get about your insurance coverage at the time of service. However, regardless of how well they might be able to predict your coverage, providers are often still sometimes just as surprised as the patient when dealing with unexpected changes in coverage and quirks with different insurance plans. Because of this uncertainty, the amount you pay at the time of service may differ from the amount you actually owe.

No matter how much your provider may try to help navigate your insurance policy, the ultimate responsibility for the balance of a denied claim belongs to the patient. The total amount you will owe is called “patient responsibility” because you’re the one who will have to pay the bill and ultimately responsible for ensuring that you are paying the correct amount. Billing errors aren’t common, but they do happen and can be fixed pretty easily if you know how to find them.

PATIENT RESPONSIBILITY

There are three things that you’ll need to keep track of to know for sure if you are being billed the correct amount by your provider.

  1. The amount you paid at the time of service.
  2. The amount your explanation of benefits stated you would owe.
  3. The amount of the bill you receive from your provider.

Ideally, #1 and #2 are equal and #3 never happens because you’ve already paid the correct amount for the service you’ve received after the appointment. For standard visits and simple insurance plans with copayments instead of deductibles, this is usually pretty easy. Your insurance says you’ll owe $25 for a visit, so you’ll pay your $25 when you check out and know that the rest will be covered. Easy. Unfortunately, there are far more instances where deductibles, co-insurances, exclusions, and other insurance hurdles will also apply to your benefits and make things more difficult to predict.

These types of “high deductible / shared percentage” plans are becoming much more common and make up all of the possible options available on the health exchange for Durham County in 2017. Because the total bills you’ll receive for these kind of plans are very much dependent on factors that you can’t guarantee before the service is rendered, the amounts you are charged for certain services are much more unpredictable.

This is where a basic checklist comes in handy:

#1. Remember what you paid.

Because most FSA plans now allow you to submit an electronic PDF of your receipts for tax purposes, you probably don’t need to save a real paper receipt of your transaction. However, you will still need to keep track of how much you’ve paid, just like any other bill you might have. You can also always refer back to your credit card statement or look at your online banking history to reference the charges, if needed. Either way, if you actually get a bill, you’ll want to look up previous payments towards your expected out-of-pocket expenses for that service and make sure they are already deducted from your total balance.

#2. Check your Explanation of Benefits (EOB).

This is a statement issued by your insurance company and either mailed or uploaded to your online member services account about 2-3 weeks after every claim filed on your behalf by a medical provider or facility. Your final out-of-pocket expenses are usually listed under a column titled “total patient responsibility” and will your insurer’s reasoning for each balance owed will be detailed on this document after your insurance benefits have been assigned to your claim. If you receive a bill because your insurer says your plan didn’t pay for something, this document will tell you why.

#3. Check your bill.

If you know what you’ve paid (shown on your receipt) and how much you should owe (based on your EOB), you can pretty much figure out how much you’ll be billed after the service.

Amount owed on EOB – Amount paid at time of service = Amount still owed

There are always exceptions at each facility you visit that may lead to separate fees associated with their services, but those are usually relatively minor compared to the total cost of care. If you think there is a problem with the amount you are being billed, be sure to contact your provider and double check to see if there are any other fees or balances that may have contributed to the difference before attempting to contact your insurance.

FIXING A PROBLEM

So, you’ve looked at your EOB and examined at your bill and the two numbers still don’t match up. Or, worse, they do matchup and the amount is significantly higher than you were expecting. Now that you have identified a potential discrepancy with the bill, what do you do about it? Your first phone call depends on where you find the problem.

My EOB and the bill from my provider both show the same amount due.

This is a problem between you and your insurer. In this case, the problem would be that you disagree with the amount your insurer said you would owe since your provider’s information matches the insurer. This means that the problem lies at the start of the claim process where your insurance assigned your plan’s benefits to the claim they received. You thought you would owe one thing, but your insurance said something else.

Here are the steps you should take to work towards a solution:

  1. On your EOB, look up the “Remark Code” for the line items that are being denied. These are generally 2 or 3 digit alphanumeric codes that reference a longer explanation of denial later on in the document. This is a summary of the actual reason your insurance is using to deny this charge. If this summary explanation does not make sense to you based on how you understand your policy, you can call your insurance company for a full explanation.
  2. When you call customer service, be sure to have your insurance card and EOB in front of you so you can reference the date of service, amount billed, and the specific line item that you are questioning. They will be able to look up your insurance policy and re-examine the specific claim you are referencing at the same time to make sure your plan’s benefits were applied correctly.
  3. If your benefits were applied correctly, the representative can answer questions about your plan and help you understand how your benefits will be applied in the future so you can possibly avoid the same situation next time. Sometimes, payment is denied because they need to update information about your insurance plan, so you can answer their questions over the phone and take care of the balance in just a couple minutes. Learning more about your policy and how your insurance will process a similar claim could make a big difference in the long run.
  4. If your benefits were not applied correctly, the customer service representative should be able to notice the mistake and submit your claim for reprocessing. If this happens to be the case, you’ll want to get a reference number for the call and notify the provider that sent you a bill. The insurance will likely give you a quote like “we will reprocess this claim and send a corrected claim to your provider in 2-3 weeks.” Whenever they give you a timeframe, double it and then call your provider back to see if everything has been resolved.

My EOB says one amount owed, but the provider’s bill says something different.

If you have carefully looked at your receipt, EOB, and billing statement and still think there is a problem that is unrelated to how your insurance processed the claim, here are several logical explanations, in order of potential likelihood:

  1. You owed money for another claim. Most of the time, your billing statement only includes claim details for the claims with a balance owed. It is possible that your provider applied part of a payment you’d made to a claim that is not currently on your billing statement because that balance was covered.
    • You paid $100 at the time of service, but $40 went towards a balance from January and $60 went towards a balance from April. Because you also owed $100 from the April visit, you may receive a bill for $40 for that claim even though you paid $100 already.
  2. You owed money for additional fees and services not on the bill. Every practice is different, but there are always additional fees that you may have to pay for services that are not reimbursable by insurance companies. These include charges for things like missed appointments, form completion, records requests, and certain lab tests that aren’t covered by insurances. Part of a payment you made may have been applied to one of these types of charges.
  3. You had a previous credit applied. Sometimes, the system actually works in your favor and you might overpay for a charge up front. When this happens, you’ll receive a credit on your account that may be applied to future balances and reduce the amount you are charged at the time of service. If you were unaware of the credit, you may have expected a service to be cheaper than you thought when you paid.
    • You overpaid by $20 a couple months ago, so your provider only charged you $5 for your usual $25 copayment. When you look at your EOB, it shows that you would owe $25 for that visit, even if you only paid $5 that day.
  4. There was a mistake. Most financial correspondence between your insurer and provider is electronic and automated, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t mistakes. As the provider, we receive batches of claim data that includes dozens of claim rows and about 20 columns of payment information per claim from the insurer and we have to sift through every row, column, and number to ensure its accuracy. As you can imagine, it is very tough to get through this process and end up 100% perfect. Even at 99.9% accuracy, that means an average primary care facility will generate about 10 incorrect patient balances per month. Before getting upset or worried about the possibility of owing for a service, have your provider double check the claim first before attempting to appeal through your insurer.

You can easily identify which one of these situations is likely to apply to you by asking for a “transactional summary” of all your claims for a certain time period. All providers may call this report something different, so you’ll just need to ask for something that shows all the charges on all claims filed by the provider and how all of your payments were applied to your account over a certain time period. This will let you see, line by line, what caused the problem.

Most of the time, any changes to a bill with an amount that differs from your EOB will always be initiated by the provider who performed the service, so it’s best to start at the source if you want to fix a potential problem. I hope this has given you the knowledge to better understand your medical bills and the confidence to discuss them with your provider, if needed.

If you have any questions related to the content of this article or if you’ve experienced any other type of situation that I didn’t address, I’d love to read your comments below. Thanks for reading!

How To View Online EOBs

This is a basic description of what you’ll need to do in order to access your Explanation of Benefits (EOB) statements online. Since the majority of our patients are insured through Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, we will use their website and process as an example. Most insurers have something similar available on their own websites, so if you have a different insurance plan, you can try to take some of the concepts and adapt them to your own insurer. You can contact the individual insurer to find out how to view online EOBs for that specific insurer.

The first step, is to sign up for an online member account. For BCBSNC, you can do that by clicking here and completing the registration process. To sign up for an account, you will need your Subscriber ID Number (available on your insurance card), Date of Birth, and Zip Code on file for the primary subscriber on your plan. If you already have an account, you can click here to login.

Once you are in your account, your screen should look something like this:

health-insurance-enable-online-bcbs-screen-shot

From there:

  1. Click on “Claims” on the top bar. You are now at a screen that can show you all of the medical and pharmacy claims that have been filed by your providers.
  2. You can expand the line items by clicking the + sign and then download the individual PDF files for the individual claims, if you’d like.
  3. Click on the link to download the PDF of the EOB, or just review the plan details shown in the online tool.

This is just a brief overview of the process for checking your online Explanation of Benefits statements for BCBSNC members. The Blue Connect online account has a lot of other great features (eg. deductible status, billing statements, prescription history, network access, etc.) for patients who want to manage their health insurance plan and usage,  so it is definitely worth signing up for any online tool your insurer offers. The screens will obviously be different, but the concept of “logging in to your online account and clicking the claims tab” should be pretty consistent.

In the rest of the blog posts in this series, I will explain the specifics involved in your EOB, including detailed information on the following topics:

  1. What is an Explanation of Benefits Letter?
  2. Basic EOB Terminology
  3. Determining Patient Responsibility
  4. Determining Plan Details
  5. Accessing Online EOBs
  6. Understanding Denials and Denial Codes
  7. How To File an Appeal

If you have any specific questions or topics you would like us to discuss, please mention them in the comments below and we will address them in future posts. If you are a patient at Family Care and have any questions about EOBs you received for claims from our office, please let us know by filling out our contact form. Thank you!

Basic EOB Terminology

This is a breakdown of the major sections contained in the Explanation of Benefits letter you receive after a medical provider files a claim to your health insurer for medical services provided. More in depth breakdowns of specific terms will be included in future posts on this topic as we finish out the series (outline below).

  1. Subscriber Information:

This is basic identification information, including the name of the policy holder, type of plan, and member identification number of your insurance policy.

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What is an Explanation of Benefits letter?

This is the first article in a series about the Explanation of Benefits summaries that the patient receives after their provider files a medical claim. To read the rest of the series, please check out the links below.

What is an Explanation of Benefits letter?

Whenever you receive medical services and your provider files a claim with your health insurance, you will receive an Explanation of Benefits (EOB) letter in the mail from your insurer a few weeks after your appointment. If you are enrolled in an online membership account with your insurer, you may receive your EOBs electronically, instead. The EOB is an itemized statement of the claim filed on your behalf by your provider and gives a detailed summary of the amounts that are required to be paid by the patient. This summary includes all negotiated discounts and reflects the amount still outstanding after the insurer has processed the claim and assigned whatever insurance policy benefits the patient has through their insurance plan. This letter is meant to make sure that the patient is aware of the charges that have been filed on their behalf, thereby decreasing medical fraud and making patients aware of the true costs of their medical care.

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