
Quoting
CANeedHelp
My question involves collection proceedings in the State of: California
To my shock I recently received a letter from a colletions agency regarding a laboratory billing from over 18 months ago (in 2012). I was completely unaware of such services until I received the collections letter. To date, I had never received a bill from this particular lab. Since this was a lab they never communicated directly with me, and only communicated with the referring doctor.
After speaking with the collections firm, they communicated that the lab had billed my insurance company and was told that I was not a eligible member at the time of service. They also confirmed that they had the correct address. I even have a copy of a statement from the lab about one month later that I did actually receive that made no reference to this claimed service. After that call I contacted my insurance company, which claims they never received any such claim submission for that particular date of claimed service. The lab had a really old policy number in their files, so it sounds like they neglected to confirm the information with the referring doctor office to obtain the then current insurance information. The referring doctor had the correct information and properly submitted the claims and was paid a long time ago.
When the insurance company tried to follow up with the provider they had no information related to the claim since it had already been sent to collections. The insurance company is telling me to submit the claim myself to the insurance company. It's fine with me to submit the claim myself. My concern is over my credit not being impacted by something that was of no control of mine. The provider is an in-network provider within my insurance. For 2012 I had reached my deductible and out of pocket maximum within my insurance policy. So I'm sure that the claim would be paid in full by the insuranc policy. My next concern is that the billing would be contractually reduced based on the provider contract with the insurance company and how that will be impacted with a collections agency involved now. On top of that issue would then be the fees and interest being charged by the collections firm.
I have already sent a dispute to the collections firm. I have also sent two unanswered letters to the lab trying to address this issue.
What should I do regarding this collections account?
On the insurance claim submission form, should I have the payment sent to the provider or should I request it to be sent to me?
How do I make sure this doesn't impact my credit at all?
I can see major issues on the collection company side, since I never even knew of such provided service, no communication was ever directly with me, no billing was ever received, nor was any agreement directly with me.
Thanks in advance for the help.