Hi Mimi,
I just wanted to give you a really quick write-up about Covid billing, as promised. Sorry it took so long.
This is very important for anyone you know who was uninsured when visiting the hospital for Covid.
This also is very urgent now, however, because there has been a significant change to Cares Act covid billing, nationally.
Essentially, people with outstanding hospital bills have to get their hospital to bill the gov. this coming Monday or all bets are off on the gov paying. HRSA (the agency who pays the bill for Cares Act) has run out of funds and has set 22 March as the deadline for submissions.
I’m hoping you will send something out to your mailing list or friends who you know may have an outstanding hospital bill for their Covid.
Meanwhile, I just saved myself $5,000 by jumping all over this. Here’s my short story on it.
In a nutshell, I went to the emergency room despite knowing it would be expensive because I was advised by a billing expert that the Cares Act would cover it completely.
Imagine my surprise when at the end of last year I received a $5000 bill from Baycare (owner of Morton Plant) demanding payment.
So we re-contacted our friend the billing expert and she said that was complete BS and told us what to do.
Basically we had to contact the billing department at Morton Plant and tell them that they needed to be billing this to HRSA. I won’t get into it in depth here but the billing department at Baycare/Morton was pretty incompetent. It depended on who you spoke with but there were some other people who didn’t even know that HRSA existed. So this took a bit of arm twisting and perseverance.
But the good news is Morton Plant confirmed to me today that they did in fact bill HRSA (yesterday) and it should be covered in full.
So if there’s anyone out there who needs this help, they can contact me by text at 727-452-5241 and I’ll talk to them. I can even put them in contact with my billing friend (she has offered it but I’ll just save her some trouble by screening a bit).
-Hans
Hans Eisenman
