Despite their best offers, a doctor or medical institution may make errors in billing you for their services. You need to pay careful attention to everything done when treated by a doctor or at a hospital if you hope to successfully dispute any errors you feel are in your bill. Following are steps for disputing medical bills.
Request an itemized statement from the medical billing company. This may take a few days to receive in the mail. Be sure to indicate the date of service or a billing period as some insurance companies take longer to process a claim and the processing date could differ from the actual date of treatment. If you went in for a doctor’s visit in January, request an itemized billing statement from January through March.
Review your itemized billing statement paying attention to each line item. There should be a transaction listed for each charge after insurance has paid. If you have no insurance filed, you will need to focus on the items listed as billed. Any medical codes used should also show a description of what each code means.
Look at each date of service separately. Most visits will list the physician’s name first then the date of service.
Record each charge you are disputing on a separate piece of paper linking it to the date of service in question. Pay attention to large charges like x-rays or lipid panels if you did know you didn’t have these services performed; these are the first you will want to include in your dispute as they are easy to spot. Next look for the smaller items like dosages of medicine.
Inspect more closely any panels for which you are billed. These might be duplicated if they are charged separately then as a bundle. For instance, you will not typically have two EKGs done on the same visit, so make sure you aren’t charged for one EKG then charged again for one under a bundle such as “cardiac screening tests.”
Compose a letter to dispute all charges in question to the medical billing company. Indicate your findings, request that your bill be reviewed and ask that the billing company send you a corrected billing statement.
Create a separate letter to your insurance company detailing the same information. They should be more than happy to pursue this matter with the medical billing company since they were probably paid twice for something or paid for services that were not rendered at all by your doctor.