[I absolutely abhor the health insurance system in the USA. Actually, I hate it, loathe it and despise it. I just received two bills in the mail from the hospital, and they caused me to spend the better part of the afternoon on the phone. Now, in any other civilized country, say Iceland, you pay a small co-pay for health care. I’m not even sure if you pay for hospital admissions, but usually you pay one (and only one) bill up front, but occasionally you pay it after the fact.<\/p>\n
Now, here in this for-profit, fractured health insurance landscape, I have to personally spend my time checking to see if every single bill is correctly processed. Which would be ok-ish if there were only a handful of bills. But no, for some arcane reason, the doctors themselves bill the hospital for their time, resulting in a bill for every single time a doctor looks your way. Bjarki now has more than 60 bills to his name. Thankfully I think the hospital bill (for the room, supplies and stuff, anything but the doctors) is lumped together in one visit, so the paperwork avalanche is potentially smaller.<\/p>\n
So what am I whining about? Well, to date, the insurance company has mis-processed two pregnancy screenings, leaving me with $250 in incorrect charges (1 call to insurer, 1 to hospital billing). Also, while they were fixing their first round of processing, some contract changed and the hospital ended up still billing me $7 (1 call to hospital billing and 1 call to the insurer). To boot, Bjarki’s insurance company sent us multiple “explanation of benefits” claiming they surely weren’t the primary insurance, and could we please call them about that (2 calls to the insurer, 1 call to hospital billing to tell them about the problem and that we’re not paying the $3,123 they’re billing us). Bjarki also has Medi-Cal insurance while he’s in the hospital, but that one weirdly and randomly starts on July 01 (2 calls to find out), so it doesn’t cover his hospital stay, which started on Jun 28th (2 calls to the hospital billing). Then I had to call about Finnur’s dental insurance (1 call to the insurer, 1 to the dentist to tell them they were wrong). And I haven’t even started getting the bills for myself and Reynir! GAAAAAA!<\/p>\n
Other than that, I’m still stuck at home. I did help out at daycare this morning, but other than that I’ve slept, fixed our camera, eaten and cursed the insurance system. Bjarki had a rough day yesterday and last night, so this morning they stopped the fortifier and upped the flow on his cannula to make into a “poor man’s CPAP”. It’s virtually certain now that he’s refluxing from his stomach, but the acidity study won’t be done until Monday at the earliest so he can’t get medications until maybe Tuesday or Wednesday. Until then he’ll probably keep desatting as usual. Poor kid. After they made the above changes, he’s apparently been doing much better today, so we hope he’ll keep that up.<\/i>]<\/p>\n
Stutt \u00fe\u00fd\u00f0ing. \u00c9g haaaaata bandar\u00edska heilsutryggingakerfi\u00f0. Ef einhverjum h\u00e1lfvita e\u00f0a h\u00e1lfvitu dettur \u00ed hug a\u00f0 koma einhverju sl\u00edku \u00e1 f\u00f3t \u00e1 \u00cdslandi, \u00fe\u00e1 flytjum vi\u00f0 til Frakklands!! <\/p>\n
\u00c9g er enn\u00fe\u00e1 f\u00f6st heima. Hj\u00e1lpa\u00f0i til \u00e1 leiksk\u00f3lanum \u00ed dag, en svaf annars bara, \u00e1t og laga\u00f0i myndav\u00e9lina. Og j\u00e1 eyddi s\u00ed\u00f0deginu hringjandi \u00ed tryggingarnar og innheimtudeildina \u00e1 sp\u00edtalanum. GAAAAA!<\/p>\n
Bjarki \u00e1tti frekar sl\u00e6man dag \u00ed g\u00e6r og n\u00f3tt svo \u00feau h\u00e6ttu a\u00f0 styrkja brj\u00f3stamj\u00f3lkina me\u00f0 form\u00falu og juku fl\u00e6\u00f0i\u00f0 \u00e1 nefr\u00f6rinu til a\u00f0 b\u00faa til \u00feykistu nefp\u00fast. Honum gekk miki\u00f0 betur eftir \u00fea\u00f0 og n\u00fa er bara a\u00f0 b\u00ed\u00f0a eftir maga-upp-fl\u00e6\u00f0is sko\u00f0uninni sem ver\u00f0ur eftir helgi. Vonandi ver\u00f0ur helgin ekki of erfi\u00f0 fyrir greyi\u00f0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[I absolutely abhor the health insurance system in the USA. Actually, I hate it, loathe it and despise it. I just received two bills in the mail from the hospital, and they caused me to spend the better part of the afternoon on the phone. Now, in any other civilized country, say Iceland, you payRead more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-container col-md-12"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hrefna.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}