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| you took advantage of me |
| 11.01.06 (5:50 pm) [edit] |
I should be doing my homework or playing with my kids or, I don't know, putting linens on my bed, but I don't feel like it. Instead, let me tell you about my kid.Jake is being tested right now. He's undergoing a battery of intelligence and psychological tests -- more for my own peace of mind than anything else. DH has been using the Parent Effectiveness stuff we learned really well, but I can't get past Jacob's anger. He's handling it pretty well everywhere else but home (DING DING DING!), but some of the stuff we saw this summer made me nervous about the depressive gene worming its way through our eldest child. So a few weeks ago, DH and I shlepped Jake to a fancy assessment shrink, who spent a few hours grilling us and a little time hanging with the boy. He summarized by saying that he didn't see anything obviously sociopathic or upsetting, but he would recommend this full battery of testing in order to determine how best to support Jake going forward -- academically as well as emotionally. Can't argue with that, right? Well, you can argue with the cost, which he said was $1600 including all the testing, scoring, and a school visit. But, the doc said, he'd make an exception for us and accept our Blue Cross, so all we had to pay was a copay and perhaps coinsurance of (I think) 10 percent. So DH and I nodded to each other and scheduled some appointments. And then the guy charged me two copays for one session -- because he says the copays are charged by the hour. What? Excuse me? I'm nothing if not used to shrink bills (which, ironically, don't seem to shrink as fast as I'd like them to), and I've never been charged by the hour. By the session, yes. For phone sessions, yes. But by the hour? That just stuck in my craw, and finally I called Blue Cross. The doctor's medical group was on Blue Cross, so the rep with whom I spoke went on the warpath. We might not even have to pay a copay, she said... she was checking. Sad to say, she got back to me a day or two later and said that, while the doc's practice was on the plan, *he* was not, and therefore could charge anything he wanted to. Including, apparently, copays by the hour. Okay, that pissed me off, but this is for my son's best interests, right? Okay, we'll just space out the two testing sessions so they're not two weeks in a row. And the first one was today. I brought Jake downtown and handed him over to the doc with a fresh hot cocoa from Dunkin Donuts and only a little trepidation. And then stalked the waiting room. They took a break halfway through and came to visit me, and then went back in. After the break, I carefully wrote out a check for $60, muttering in my head the whole time about the double copay. And when the testing for the day was complete, the doc brought me back to his office, where Jacob was holding court over his Lego Guys. I handed the doc the check, and felt my chin hit my chest when he said "Okay, and you'll pay the rest next time?" "Um, you mean, the next copay for the next session, right?" "Well, it's going to take me, let's see, about two hours to score today's tests," he said. "So that's another two copays." "I have to pay a copay for your scoring time?" I asked. "Yes, but you can pay that next time." He went back to his desk and shuffled some papers. "And you'll know that on the sheet I'm sending to the insurance company, that it will say today was for four hours, not two -- because of the two hours I'll spend on scoring." My mind raced. Was this fraud? Or just finagling -- a way to get as much money out of the process as possible? What was I supposed to do -- stop in the middle of the whole thing? I told the doc that I'd have to wait to do the next session until after we were paid again. Because now, I have to come armed not only with the $60 double copay for the session itself -- excuse me, $90 TRIPLE copay because he needs three hours -- but with another $150 in copays for the five hours he says he's going to spend scoring that five hours of testing. Am I wrong to feel angry and resentful? You get what you pay for, right? But I feel like this short, dapper, little man (and I mean LITTLE) is nickle and diming us, and we just can't afford it. I burned with resentment all the way out. And snapped a little at Jacob when we waited for the #3 bus to my office, because he wanted to hail a cab and started to do so. It's not Jacob's fault. And it's possible that we're spending all of this money to hear that our kid is a very bright, fairly normal kid with a bit of a temper. And I know there are people who have spent far more to hear less encouraging news about their kids, so I'm certainly not belittling the process... especially since Danny has an Early Intervention screening next week (free, thankfully). But the way the money has been pulled out of us, like a magician's multicolored scarf, just feels wrong and tacky. |
posted by: rosietulips (reply)
post date: 11.02.06 (9:52 pm)
That really sucks about the fees!! But Jacob is worth it :-)
posted by: christine@swanktrendz (reply)
post date: 11.04.06 (10:23 am)
That doctor sounds a bit fishy. I've done pyschological/educational batteries of tests, and I generally find that for every 30 minutes of testing I can count on 60 minutes of thorough marking. It gets easier the more you do, but to err on the side of safety, 1:2 ratio usually holds. 4 hours seems a bit excessive.
The sad thing is you really want the extra help/assessment for your son, yet there is probably a nagging voice in your head that is saying, "Tell him to get lost." It's a hard call. I'm not sure where you live, but we can usually get all the tests done through referrals through the schools to the doctors etc. It is paid for when it is a referral. So although it may take a little longer, you can request that your school begin the assessments and referrals. Personally, it would be nice for the doctor to offer up that 10% because really, you wouldn't know what he was billing and surely he must know that you can't afford to pay him to mark.
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