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  1. #11
    Join Date
    Jun 2006
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    Massachusetts
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    Default Re: Billed by a Medical Lab After Paying a Doctor's Bill

    Mercy, that's pretty much my point. The OP is saying, well, the doctor should have told me there would be additional charges from the lab. Whether by that he means the doctor personally or the doctor's staff, the answer is pretty much the same; it is so much SOP for the lab to bill separately that I imagine anyone in the doctor's office would have assumed he already knew that.

    (My dad is a doctor. Believe me, I know how it works and what gets done by whom. I was speaking collectively. Sorry if that offends you.)

  2. #12
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    Oct 2006
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    16,474

    Default Re: Billed by a Medical Lab After Paying a Doctor's Bill

    Quote Quoting cbg
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    Mercy, that's pretty much my point. The OP is saying, well, the doctor should have told me there would be additional charges from the lab. Whether by that he means the doctor personally or the doctor's staff, the answer is pretty much the same; it is so much SOP for the lab to bill separately that I imagine anyone in the doctor's office would have assumed he already knew that.

    (My dad is a doctor. Believe me, I know how it works and what gets done by whom. I was speaking collectively. Sorry if that offends you.)
    I agree that its so standard that the doctor's office would be unlikely to think that they had to point that out to the patient, but I think that when the patient is paying up front, out of pocket, that the office has a bit of a different obligation to explain the bill.

    I needed to have a similar procedure done and I told them up front that I needed an exact quote because I needed to know whether or not I could afford to have the procedure done at that time. The office manage took a couple of days to work up an exact quote for me. I paid the bill in full after the doctor was done with the procedure. A couple of weeks later I got a bill from the doctor's office that reflected the payment I made, but showed a balance due of almost as much as I had already paid.

    I called the doctor's office and made a complaint. The doctor called me back and apologized and cancelled the rest of the bill. A couple of weeks after that I got another bill that I did not realize was from the lab. It was formatted the same as the previous bill, but had a different amount. I called the doctor's office again and they explained to me that it was for the lab, not them, and I was ok with that, although I would have preferred to know up front that they were sending things to the lab and that there would be a charge for that. They apologized again and explained that they were not used to dealing with cash patients, so sometimes it did not occur to them that they needed to explain things more clearly.

  3. #13
    Join Date
    Jun 2006
    Location
    Massachusetts
    Posts
    24,521

    Default Re: Billed by a Medical Lab After Paying a Doctor's Bill

    None of which changes the fact that the OP owes the bill. The doctor's office cannot cancel the lab bill, and I frankly don't think the doctor's office is obligated to assume that because he is a cash patient, he lives under a rock the way our OP obviously does.

  4. #14
    Join Date
    Oct 2006
    Posts
    16,474

    Default Re: Billed by a Medical Lab After Paying a Doctor's Bill

    Quote Quoting cbg
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    None of which changes the fact that the OP owes the bill. The doctor's office cannot cancel the lab bill, and I frankly don't think the doctor's office is obligated to assume that because he is a cash patient, he lives under a rock the way our OP obviously does.
    I agree, but the doctor's office might cancel the bill for removing the stitches. I have actually never had a doctor charge extra for removing stitches.

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