The worst $00 bucks I ever spent.

As part of my annual physical, my doctor recommended that I get a "dermatological screening", so I trundled myself off to the Seattle Polyclinic and did just that.

The screening itself was pretty non-eventful. No problems, yadda, yadda, yadda. But I had this wart on my thumb.

(before anyone starts going anywhere dirty, this is nothing venerial. I've had warts like that ever since I was a kid. You wouldn't believe how things like that gross people out though. It's just a wart.)

Anyway, I mentioned this to the doctor, and he said "we can take care of that", and got the sprayer thingy that did his thing. Took maybe two minutes.

So imagine my suprise when I got a bill for $100 from Polyclinic for "pre-cancerous legion removal" , and looked down at my thumb and noticed that the "pre-cancerous legion" (that really does sound better than "wart", doesn' it?) was still there.

So I called my insurance company, and they told me that I shouldn't pay it, and that this was part of the "provider write-off". I called the Polyclinic, and was told that I did indeed owe the money and that I needed a copy of the "explanation of benefits" (it came a few days later. It was just as exciting as what you would expect something called an "explanation of benefits" to be). I then sent an email to Polyclinic asking if I could at least get another zapping of the wart because it hadn't actually been "removed" as per their billing, and got this in reply:

Dear Mr. Langdon,

Thank you for your email. Patient privacy laws don’t allow me to go into detail in email about the treatment you received (so you can send me your phone number if you’d rather talk in detail in person). The simplest answer to your question is that the situation you described is what commonly happens in a dermatological treatment and it is not uncommon for more than one procedure to be necessary. The bill you received is for the procedure performed (vs. purchasing an outcome with as many treatments as necessary to obtain the outcome).

I hope this answers your question. Please feel free to send me your phone number if you’d prefer to talk in person.

Now, it would seem to me that since the procedure is labled a "removal of a pre-cancerous lesion", yet the "pre-cancerous lesion" isn't removed, the procedure isn't done. What do you think?

I'll probably go ahead and pay this damn thing, because I don't want my credit messed with, but it just goes to show you how stupid our health care system is. Hillary Clinton was onto something when she proposed nationalized healthcare.