Children's Mercy Hospital should be ashamed: An open letter

Children's Mercy holds this spot of endearment in the hearts of Kansas Citians and for many reasons it is certainly justified but they aren't all that AND a bag of chips in my experience.

If you have ever had the misfortune of dealing with them because you have a child who needs their services you can have a love-hate relationship with them not only in your heart but your pocketbook.

On one hand you love the quality of service, the caring doctors and staff, and the access to some of the best specialized care you can get for a child. On the other, once you get to billing your life can become a nightmare. So, I'll ask this question and hope someone at Children's Mercy will see it as a challenge to improve. Why can't you pursue the same level of excellence, empathy, and goodwill that you show in patient care to billing and insurance issues?

In our situation, we are educated professionals with good (major company) insurance and good jobs and we have put up with a ridiculous amount of problems with claims, billing, and threats to be sent to collections over relatively small amounts of money. First, they claim to deal with all insurance but they don't. They will take any insurance money but in some cases you have to handle filing the claims for companies they won't bill directly. In other cases you will have to fight with them over what part your insurance company pays and what you are suppose to pay and lots of incorrect bills coming your way that perhaps someone less savy will just pay never to know that it was something not your responsibility. Then they get angry for asking good consumer questions when you go back like............how is this covered by MY insurance? How dare we treat health care like a good consumer. So, you have a bill for say $1000. Insurance says the usual and customary or approved rate for the procedure is $600. This is assuming that they actually billed it in way the insurance company approves of the procedure. You are suppose to pay 20% and the insurance company is suppose to pay 80%. So they pay $480 and I am suppose to pay $120. Except CMH wants you to pay the $120 PLUS the difference they didn't get from insurance of $400 so they want $620 from you. So they take the insurance but they don't accept the insurance company's standard negotiated rates or usual and customary and further you don't know who is being the biggest bastard the insurance company or the hospital because they have the knowledge of volume and we are newbies to the process.

In a real world example of how ridiculous this can be....my child had tubes put in the ears at CMH. Again the doctor was wonderful but the billing? CMH billed us for ear wax removal as a separate line item in the procedure and insurance rejected it saying that is part of the procedure. CMH.....pay the difference or else you go to collections.

So, we fight on dealing first with a child who needs care and second with the hospital who has an endowment that is huge and still threatens to send us to collections over a disputed $30 remaining balance here and there.

Children's Mercy.....shame on you. Then, finally they have the audacity to call me and solicit a donation? I'd like to see you take pride in having the best billing and claims department for customer satisfaction in the country in addition to all the other things.

Note: Generally, I take pride in a well organized and thoughtful blog but on this one.....I'll just rant. Sorry about that but the anger and disappointment flows. I've raised tens of thousands of dollars for them and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth to be treated in such a way......