Point of View: Palpitations

While I pay our bills every month, I tend not to follow through with the controversial kind, leaving those annoying back-and-forth agons to Mary, who the other day held my feet to the fire when a hefty one from Southampton Hospital came in.

Over all, I think it came to $34,000 or so — for a few hours in the emergency room and an overnight stay. The insurance company paid some of it, but that left about $6,000 as the insured’s responsibility.

I called the insurance company and learned that that indeed was the sum we owed given our plan’s deductible. Trixie A. said, when I asked, that she would send me the details as to how they came to settle upon the $6,000.

If true, it was yet another example, Mary said, of insurers passing on to patients more and more of the costs of health care. (We have on one of our bookshelves an entire issue of Time magazine tracing this shift, which in the end recommends Medicare for all.)

To continue, I swallowed hard, and phoned the hospital. The woman with whom I spoke was very cordial — and sympathetic when I said I thought she’d agree that its bill was a big nut for a middle-class couple. (We had, by the way, no quarrel with the care provided.)

As Mary had recommended, I asked for an itemized bill, and soon after was mailed one.

“The elephant in the room,” I said afterward to the hospital’s representative, “are these three $9,500-an-hour observation room charges. One more hour and you’d about equal my net pay for the year. . . .”

She would, she said, look further into the matter and would get back to me. With a sigh — and not very hopeful that anything would come of this review — I went back to work.

Just a few minutes later, the phone rang.

There had, she said, been “an error.” There should have been only one $9,500 observation room charge instead of three, and, besides, she had found other charges that had been duplicated. I was to do nothing then until it all got sorted out again with the insurer, a recalculation that would probably take a month or so.

Naturally, I was greatly relieved — and proud that my queries would presumably result in about $20,000 being excised from our metastatic bill.

I write this, not so much as a criticism of the hospital, which, as I say, provided good care and was responsive, but as a caveat to others who, rather than make that call and ask for an itemized bill, might, with a big sigh, send off a check in the full amount.