Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Talking to a lawyer about All Saints

I just got a Collection Agency bill for over $10,000 on an original $1,000 All Saints bill I never got. If this is a bill from when they did the shit job of a double bypass and weren't capable of transferring a Paraplegic without putting me in harms way. This is the bypass over four years ago that had me near a lawsuit then. I kept the notebooks they wrote in to me. Anyone got a favorite lawyer they can recommend?

3 comments:

Sassa said...

Your best bet is to call one who does not do that sort of thing, talk to the receptionist, and ask her which one she recommends. They know the insides of most lawyers. It's a case of 'do you want to talk to the person in charge or the person who knows what's going on'. My favorite lawyer is Michelsens.

kkdither said...

Both you and SER should go halves on a lawyer. Those bastards almost got him this last time...

OrbsCorbs said...

Sorry, I don't know any good lawyers.

My sister has had some real trouble with All Saints billing system and department. She received invoices for bills that had been paid, not once, but many times. Each time she would prove that the bill(s) had been paid, only to soon receive another notice. It finally escalated to collections and then my sister got pissed. She and her husband have been quite succesful in life and didn't like the idea of their credit score being damaged because All Saints doesn't know how to run a biling departmnet. They finally contacted their lawyer and he took care of things, (At what cost to my sister, I do not know.)

Huck you should do it if only because of the hundreds of similar stories about All Saints billing system that people wrote about in their comments on the Journal Times' stories. Soon afterwards, All Saints launched a PR campaign promising better service, blah, blah, blah. BS - nothing has changed. Mom and sis still use the place regularly, and their bills are still screwed up regularly.

I was very sick this past winter (and still not comradely over it). It lasted for months and I was seeing doctors and having invasive tests done and going from place to place to accommodate them, all while I was sick. Very sick. And after months and months of appointments and referrals, nobody could figure anything out. Each doctor finally referred me to the next one up until my gastroenterologist was at the top of the list. He said he thought it was all triggered by my depression and that I should see a shrink about changing my meds.

Without even going into the "it's all in your head" aspect (I lost 26 pounds and crapped blood for weeks. That's in my head?), I am flabbergasted that they can get away with this kind of stuff. The total bills for all of it will be in the tens of thousands of dollars, I'm sure - maybe even a hundred. I was in excruciating pain for much of the time and forced to go to different cities while heaving, crapping, etc. It was one of the worst experiences of my life.

And for that, the doctors make mucho money. For not figuring out the problem and putting me through a wringer, they get more money. I told my primary care physician that when I was in the auto repair business, if I had hung up a customer's car for three months, charged him tens of thousands of dollars, and didn't fix the problem, I would go to prison. Doctors just get more money. This insanity has to stop. There has to be a way to tie doctors' salaries to performance and to give patients prices beforehand so that they can shop and compare with other physicians.