I went to inpatient detox a few months ago after a 6 month battle with addiction. The rehab told me that the pre-auth went through without issues and that my care was covered.
In December, two months after discharge, I'm told that my insurance (Regence Blue Cross Blue Shield, if it matters) is refusing to pay. They claim that I wasn't sick enough to need inpatient detox.
I'm not proud, but I broke down on the phone with the rehab center's billing department when I first got the news. I wasn't mean or anything, I was more like, how could they let this happen? They told me I was covered, and that all I had to focus on was getting better.
The bill is $7000. The billing guy eventually told me that I signed a document stating that if insurance doesn't pay, I accept financial responsibility. I asked for a copy of that document. He said he would email it. He didn't.
Before anyone asks, yes we are appealing - I've had to get very involved in that too as the center has been extremely disorganized and I've lost trust in their ability to advocate for me. I don't want to get into that here, it's a whole other can of worms.
It's now April and I've asked twice more for that document and my intake paperwork by email. I haven't received that document, or any of the intake paperwork I've requested. When I emailed again a few days ago I was told, "we're working on getting it."
My question: this is weird, right? What could possibly be going on? Don't they have to give me this paperwork if I ask for it? And why wouldn't they be able to just pull the file and send it?
This has honestly been so hard.
Thanks for any help.
Edit
I'm not trying to be rude, because I know you are all really just trying to help.
But if people could stop reminding me that a pre-auth is not a guarantee, I would really, really appreciate it. I know that now. I didn't know that in October.
I'm still in recovery, and although I described the addiction as 6 months for the sake of brevity, the fact is I've been fighting this battle with addiction for over 10 years. This was just the latest relapse after being sober for about 5 years, and it was really a crisis in my life. I have other significant ongoing mental health issues too, and honestly all of that makes it really hard to do the basics, let alone find extra energy to understand the nightmare of bureaucracy that is insurance. I'm really doing my best. It's just hard right now for me to take comments about how pre-auth doesn't mean a guarantee of payment, because it kind of makes me feel like there's an implication that I should have foreseen this or something. I know that people probably don't really mean it like that and they're just commenting what comes to mind that would prevent these problems.
But either way, the fact is I didn't know that at the time and now it's in the past, so I have to deal with the present problem. So, I'm just asking that people don't focus on that particular piece of advice. Thank you if you are able to do that.