Lois this is actually a very easy thing to prevent especially if you bill by computer. Our system has a setting that we can change. We set the lower limit for billing patients, currently $5. Anything less than that amount and no bill goes out. We just collect the next time the patient comes in. A huge insurance company should be able to do at least as well as us since they have giant IT departments.
My reaction to this was borne not just out of the silliness of it but the fact that insurance companies have zero respect for my time or my staff's time and are constantly doing things like this. Yesterday I spent 20 minutes on the phone with an insurance company trying to get approval for a prescription for Tamiflu for an 80 year old patient who was very sick with the flu. This medicine has to be started within the first 48 hours or its of no use and an 80 year old with the flu can get sick very fast. This drug is the standard of care for the flu so there should be no reason for me to have to get authorization since its never going to be denied. The insurance company doesn't care though. They waste our time in the hopes that we will give up and they will get out of paying for something. It costs them very little because they hire minimum wage workers to man the phones on their end while a physician has to battle for the patient on our end in order to get thing approved.
This was just a way to have a laugh and take out some frustration on them. I'm thinking of taking them to small claims court if they don't send me my 3 cents back ;-)
Good idea! i actually understand your frustration better than most, having been a writer and editor for insurance publications for a large part of my career. I never ran out of things to write about. If an error occurs it is magnified in large corporations. Unfortunately, no one seems to be in charge of such errors. Insurance companies could certainly do a better job than they are doing. It has to be even more frustrating for doctors than patients. I have often said that insurance companies--especially health insurance companies--are crying out by their own actions or inaction for more governmemt regulation and control, no matter how much they resist it and denigrate it. They have a responsibility to the people they insure but they shirk that responsibility. It's time for a big change in the way the insurance industry operates.
Andrew Tobias in the 1980s wrote a book called The invisible Bankers, a perfect definition of how insurance companies operate in this country. It shows that they are, in reality, unregulated bankers whose irresponsibile profiteering is seldom checked, even as banks are. You can read about the book here. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invisible_Bankers
Lois