The Numbers Are In

So I think after a couple phone calls this week. All of the medical bills associated with the twins have been settled. Sure Evelyn had a somewhat recent trip to the hospital for her MRI, but I actually paid a couple bills this week from the girls stay at the NICU. It has been four months since the girls came home (has it been that long already?) and only now do I think I'm all paid up.

I have to say that while Aetna, our insurance provider, has been very good to so far it pays (literally and figuratively) to procrastinate paying medical bills. I did not really procrastinate on purpose mind you. In fact I was quite organized. The biggest reason for my hesitation to pay bills was due to the girls' NICU stay spanning a calendar year. Since I knew the bills would be astronomical, I also knew that we would have no troubles reaching our yearly out of pocket maximum for 2007 and 2008. Side note: Try to plan your emergent medical care fall within one insurance enrollment cycle.

So when the bills came rolling in, I paid some of the smaller ones, but waited until I had all of the bigger bills in hand before I started to pay them. I figured if the bills were totaling too high I had some chance of rectifying the situation by threatening a provider with non-payment and working with Aetna in the meantime. If I just paid all bills as they came in I imagined it would be a difficult process to try to get a medical provider or Aetna to cut a check back to me for overpayment. Luckily, I never had to threaten anyone. Aetna has been pretty good, though I have had to clear up a some mistakes along the way. For example, my heart went in my throat a bit when a visit to Aetna's website showed that Aetna was denying all claims for Clara's NICU stay and the hospital was allowed to charge me the small sum of about $263,000.00 (not a typo).

The real payoff for my procrastination was for the bill from the Pediatric group that works in the NICU. Granted the NICU doctors have a terribly tough job, but they charge separately from the hospital. In fact they attempted to charge over $800 per day per child (just a bit steep). On most days, for our girls, that amounted to a doctor spending about 10 minutes per child during rounds and taking a quick call from Kristina or me to give a status report. Anyway, after sitting on this bill for about a month I received a recording from their billing department that they would deduct 20% off the bill if I paid within the next 15 days...so I did. Though I wonder how much they would have discounted if I waited longer. Anyway, since the doctors had already been paid tens of thousands of dollars by Aetna, I assume a discount was offered because that would be a lot easier than eventually trying to go into some sort of collections agency to handle this (I wasn't going to let it go that far).

To close, I will give stats on what the medical industry thought all of this ordeal was worth. Granted, these numbers are what the medical providers would charge someone off the street without insurance. Since insurance companies have negotiated rates, I think Aetna allowed the medical providers to charge roughly half of these numbers. I've rounded the numbers to the nearest hundred.
Kristina: $76,100
Clara: $427,200
Evelyn: $472,000 - Not sure how or why her bill is higher than Clara's. Maybe Aetna's website is not quite right.
Total: $975,300 (almost a million!!!)

Thanks to pretty good coverage and out of pocket maximums we've paid only a wee amount of that million (though this hasn't exactly been free).

That's all. Sorry this post was a bit scattered, but I wanted to convey another side of all the medical fun we've had.