You would think after 15 years of managing a medical office that I would get use to patients/customers with unrealistic expectations, but I haven’t. For example today a new patient showed up for their appointment and handed the front office assistant an expired insurance card. When questioned about the expiration date she said that it was renewed and valid. She was then informed that the insurance company would be called to verify this information and if there were any problems she would need to pay a portion of her charges for the visit today up-front and when the insurance paid this would be refunded to her. Upon trying to verify her insurance a “real person was contacted at the insurance company.” I make this point because many times we only can get automated information. Anyway, the gentleman at the insurance company explained that the patient’s insurance was terminated and that they did not have any other information about it being re-instated. As an extra step we called her primary doctor’s office who had referred her to see if they had any newer information for the patient’s insurance and were told that they also has expired cards. We also went online as sometimes this has current information, but no, in this case it all pointed to the patient’s insurance being terminated.
I went to the patient and explained what we had done to try to verify her insurance and that she could pay a percentage of today’s charges that would be refunded to her upon payment from her insurance company or if she would rather she could reschedule the appointment until her new insurance cards came in. This patient became very upset telling me that she paid her insurance company and did have current insurance even though this could not be verified and she did not have money to pay us, so if we were not going to see her she was going to leave (not schedule for the future), and walked out the door.
It really is amazing what people expect. This person expected the doctor to see her based on the fact that she has terminated insurance (which was verified by her insurance company) and was unwilling to pay a percentage of her visit up front until the insurance did pay. Would McDonalds give you food without you paying for it first? Would a consumer businesses accept your expired credit card, one that the company told them was not good and give you the product? I do not think so, but this patient thought that we should, pretty amazing don’t you think?
I am sure that this patient will probably not say good things about us, which is upsetting, because we really try hard to go out of our way to give our patients the best service possible. But on the other hand we will not have lost any money and will not have to fight to try to collect for unpaid services, which will save us time and money. We really will come out on the right side because we have proper guidelines set-up in our office to follow for just these types of situations and we are glad we do.
If you want some good tips on how to handle customers with unrealistic expectations follow the link below to a great article by Niall Devitt, good food for thought when dealing with these types of customers.
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