Rain Maker For Hire
Yesterday I made it rain again. I decided to hoof it over to Powell's to see if I could pick up a few more copies of the anthology with my story in it. The sky did not look rain-like and I clicked the trusty weather icon on the desktop and there was Nothing about rain. So off I went without my umbrella and wearing my non-waterproof wool hat. You can guess the rest. For the second time in two days I had to wring out my panties. Also, Powell's didn't even have the book but I've learned since that's available here.

In other news, on Monday night when I got home I had a piece of mail from a lab that performed routine and completely uncontroversial lab work for me at my regular check up in September.

The form letter indicated they hadn't received payment for their services and further that according to Oregon law, if insurance refuses to pay a claim, they need to notify the lab and the patient in writing. The bill was for $50.

The letter goes on to instruct me to contact my health insurance and find out what's going on and then call the lab and tell them and if the health insurance doesn't have a copy of the claim then I need to call the lab with the name and fax # of the representative I'm dealing with and they'll resend the bill.

For the time and money it cost to waste my time, why not just start by re-billing insurance? Why am I even being involved?

I phoned my health insurance phone tree and after being advised that wait times were longer than usual I went through their website and sent an email relaying all of the above and giving them the lab's billing department phone in the desperate hope that I can be taken out of the loop on this stupid thing.

My insurance emailed me back and said they had no record of the claim, that they don't accept faxed claims and to instruct the lab to mail the claim to the claim address. Then I called the lab and they wanted to keep me on hold forever so I hung up and faxed them a note telling them to re-bill. Stupid.