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Health Insurance Question?

About a month ago while on vacation in Denver, my husband's esophogus condition caused us to go to the ER and have an emergency EGD for dialation and extraction (he had a piece of chicken lodged in his esophogus). He was in the ER for 6 hours and went to surgery at the end of the 6th hour. On our bill, they charged us twice for the EGD ($2500 each time) and twice for an IV, though fluids were not changed nor was the IV itself. I've spoken with a few professionals working in the medical field and each have told me that they have double dipped; you can't charge twice for one operation. In other words, if I went in for a new scope and they removed something, they can't charge me for 2 surgeries in one. Can anyone offer any insight? We called our insurance company (United Healthcare) and were told to call the hospital. We called the hospital and were told to call the insurance. In addition, we are asking that the hospital/insurance review the charges. While my husband was in surgery, the GI nurse putting the charges into the computer was constantly screwing up. Because of that, we just want to verify that the charges are correct. Thus far, no one has taken our worry to any thought. We're fine with paying the charges, but if we've been overcharged then we want to work this out! And that's a KNEE scope. You can tell I've been painting a room, can't you?!

Public Comments

1. call the hospital and talk to someone in the insurance dept we have certain people that advocate for people and they are a go between for you and insurance companies the nurse should not have been putting the charges in but writing down what was used and all of our equipments have removable tags that we place on the charts each time we open something that is used on the patient and then it goes to the case management and then to the coders who do the coding for the ins companies than all that information is submitted to your ins company but that hospital should have an insurance office where you can talk to someone that is familiar with united health care insurance.....do not talk to billing they do not know anything about ins and will tell you to call your ins company every single time.
2. You may also want to call that hospital's medical records unit and get the surgical report and any other report or records that were done during his stay if you can. Use that as ammo with the hospital....how can you charge me for two procedures, when clearly it was only done once. Then ask the hospital for an itemized bill...and compare the two and take it from there.... Also be aware that sometimes hospital stretch what is consider surgery. I once had a doc put a cast on my foot and they labeled it as surgical with the insurance agency. if they removed the chicken from his throat, they may have considered that an EGD, in addition to what was done in surgery...