By Woodrow Wilcox

On July 17, 2020, received a letter from a client in Michigan City, Indiana. The letter had a medical bill in it for $121 that was addressed to our client.

The note from our client said, “Mr. Wilcox, I received this in the mail. Would you please work your magic for me?”

I had helped the same client with other medical bill problems in the past. It is a good thing for her that she uses our insurance agency. I believe that this is the only insurance agency in northwest Indiana that “goes the extra mile” to help a client when the Medicare system fails and threatens financial harm to one of our senior citizen clients.

With some editing to protect the privacy of our client, here is the letter that I sent to the firm that sent the medical bill to her.

Our client sent to our firm a bill from your firm for our review. The bill seeks a balance of $121 on Patient Account # XXXXX for services rendered on 06/18/2020.

I reviewed the bill and phoned our client’s Medicare supplement insurance company to learn what it knew of this claim. It reported that it never received such a claim from Medicare.

I phoned your firm’s office to make sure that your firm is contracted with Medicare. Your representative on that phone call assured me that it was.

The bill that your firm sent to our client shows no Medicare information regarding approval, reduction, adjustment, or anything else. That is evidence that either your firm failed to file the claim with Medicare or that your attempt to file the claim electronically failed. That is not the fault of our client – your patient. She should not be harmed financially just because someone else made a mistake in the Medicare system.

Please, file or re-file the claim with Medicare and allow time for Medicare to rule on the claim. The insurance company should get the Medicare EOB about the same time that your firm gets it. Allow reasonable time after that for the insurance company to process and pay on the claim per instructions from Medicare. Please, do not bother our client about this bill until that is done.

All the help that I gave this client was FREE OF CHARGE. If your insurance agent or agency does not give this high level of customer service, why not switch to one that does? Ours does! I do the magic