United Health Care and Riverside Methodist Hospital · Sep 4, 11:11 PM by John

As many of you know, Lily was born this past May. And it seems that our choice to switch to Riverside Methodist Hospital may have been a good one for the service and a bad one for the pocketbook. Riverside bills differently than Mount Carmel (where Bobby was born). Mount Carmel sent a single bill for the birth and stay for mom and son. Riverside chose to bill in multiple billings. One for the anesthesiologists, one for mom and one for daughter. Conveniently enough for our insurance company, United Healthcare, this gave them the ability to suggest that this meant we had three separate deductibles to meet.

We enrolled in United Healthcare’s Healthy Pregnancy Program which was supposed to waive our “Maternity Deductible” of $125. My wife called them at each of the times we were supposed to call (thank goodness my wife used her cell so we have cell records of the calls) and supplied them with the information for the hospital she would be delivering.

From the moment we entered the hospital until the time we left 35 hours later, United Healthcare found a way to turn the “maternity deductible” (supposedly now waived) into $525 of charges which they’ve sicced the accounts departments of Riverside onto us. It’s a nice racket the two of them have going.

The $125 maternity deductible was applied to the hospital billing for my wife. Evidently, when a woman gets an epidural for her delivery, that’s not part of maternity… that’s now a special service related solely to the woman and hence subject to my wife’s specific $200 deductible. Then an additional $200 deductible was applied to the less-than-24-hour-old baby who evidently wasn’t a part of the maternity process either for her standard post-delivery care.

My wife attempted to break through United Healthcare’s multiple layers of red tape and never-ending phone queues but she’s fed up with them. So, now it’s my turn to see if they can provide the services they said they provide. Riverside started their “we’re eventually going to have to send this to collections” harassing calls but I consider them collaborators with United Healthcare since, unlike Mount Carmel, they chose to bill this in a way most confusing to us, the customer, and most beneficial to the insurance company.

We’ll see how it goes.

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