Submitted by Alwaysatodds t3_10y4xnn in personalfinance
I came down to South Carolina from NYC to stay with my family for Christmas and my parents got pneumonia so I took some time off work to take care of them. A few weeks ago I got bit by a rabid dog out on a hike and had to get (20!) rabies shots over 10 days that were administered in the AnMed ER in Anderson county.
I have full NYC medicaid through Fidelis Care and confirmed that life threatening out of state ER visits are fully covered. When I got to the hospital they scanned my info and was told by a billing rep that they spoke to my insurance, could not confirm converage but wouldnt turn me away.
Yesterday I received a bill of 26k with an additional 10kish incoming from residual treatments. The hospital said that they only take medicaid from states connected to their statelines and that there was no infrastructure for them to speak to my insurance. My insurance insists they will pay as its apparently illegal for medicaid to not cover OOS ER visits but they need to be billed and when I went to the business office they refused to even see me.
Like, what do I do here? Am I stuck paying a bill my insurance will pay because the hospital I went to wont talk to them? And why would a hospital do that? Im really, really stressed out here, any help or recommendations would be very welcome.
Edit: Thanks for all the advice! I was pretty sure the hospital was being disingenuous and y'all have made me feel a lot less stressed out. I took some notes on the options everyone recommended and I'm heading back to the business office tomorrow. Hopefully this wont take months, but sooner or later my medicaid will pay for it. Its ridiculous that this is even an issue when I did everything the right way.