I came home one night this week to find a letter from my insurance company. I knew the surgery was approved, so I wasn't too concerned. The letter listed the Requested Services Summary and various service codes and descriptions of said service codes. One of the descriptions concerned me as I had not discussed it at all with the doctor. As I am prone to jumping to conclusions at the moment, I flipped out a bit. Thankfully my mum put up with my waking her and ranting on for an hour on the phone. (I owe her a couple of hours of sleep now :-) )
I emailed the dr's office the next day and thankfully they got back to me within a few hours, which is good for them. They asked for the codes and then sent me back a list of code descriptions that the dr uses. It seems the insurance co uses different descriptions, probably to intentionally torment you!
The email from the dr's office basically said (I'm paraphrasing)
"XXXXX is a very tricky insurance company. We have to get authorization for all of the possible codes he might do. If I know the CPT Code (service code) I can tell you what our description is. Each insurance company has their own descriptions and can confuse patients!"
This list helped a lot as it clarified what I was concerned about, but I will still discuss with him before surgery. I am going to bring a list to review before, I'm sure he'll love that!
So learn from my hysteria and talk to the dr before trusting what the insurance company says.
I've also now have a list of the technical medical terms and have done more searches on the web and printed out articles to read. Maybe not a good thing, but I am curious about the details of what will be done to me!
