By Woodrow Wilcox
Recently, much of my time has been occupied helping our clients fight sloppy ambulance service billing.
In the past, an ambulance service giving the wrong point of origin for an ambulance drive caused an ambulance bill over $900 for one of our clients. I discovered the error and got the ambulance firm to correct its mistake.
Then, Medicare covered the ambulance ride. That saved our client over $900.
To help a senior with a Medicare related ambulance bill, a call must be made to Medicare to discuss the claim and learn the precise reason(s) for the denial of coverage. Getting a copy of the Medicare Summary Notice and comparing it to the ambulance bill is necessary, too.
In every case of sloppy claim filing by an ambulance company, I have been able to reverse the denial by doing one or both of two things. First, I send a letter to the ambulance company reciting their error(s) and asking them to refile the claim with their error(s) corrected. If they cooperate, I won’t need to do anything more. If the ambulance company refuses to cooperate, I help the client file an appeal with Medicare to reverse the denial of the claim for ambulance service. When I have to do that work, I make sure that the appeal makes the ambulance company look sloppy and incompetent. If the ambulance company does not want to cooperate to fix its error, it deserves to be embarrassed.
In the case that I worked today for a client from Dyer, I phoned Medicare with the client and let the Medicare Claims Representative Fern Watson at a Medicare center in Kentucky tell us that the claim was denied because the ambulance company failed to use correct coding. In this way, I proved to the client that the ambulance bill was caused by the ambulance company and not by the client’s insurance company. In this case, I will save the client $1,654.40.
All the help that I give clients with these ambulance bill problems is FREE OF CHARGE. This insurance agency employs me to fight mistakes and fraud in the Medicare system that could cost our clients money. So far, I have saved our clients over two million dollars in wrongful Medicare related medical bills.
Note: Woodrow Wilcox is the senior medical bill case worker at Senior Care Insurance Services in Merrillville, Indiana. Wilcox wrote the book SOLVING MEDICARE PROBLEM$ which is available through bookstores and online.
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Written on July 1, 2021 by Woodrow Wilcox
Wilcox News Service
Box 11
Dyer, IN 46311