The Affordable Care Act's Effect on Medical Billers

Today is a day of mixed emotions for many people across America, what with it the being the quote/unquote first official day of Obamacare and the government shutdown hanging overhead.

The staunch proponents of Obamacare are joyously dancing in the streets amid a tickertape parade while those who vehemently oppose its inception are hunkered down in a fury of nail-biting anger. I think the vast majority of the population though are in a fog of miscommunication, false hope, and maybe some unnecessary worry.

What does Obamacare really mean to someone like me, an “in the trenches” medical biller? First of all it means that people will be looking to me to answer questions about their insurance now that Obamacare is here. But I have as many questions as they do. The one thing Obamacare has done is put everyone in the same boat, a boat called limbo. We don’t really know how it’s all going to work.

For example, I want to know how reliable eligibility verifications will be. I have claims on my desk right now for which I am fighting retro-termination denials. The day services were rendered, coverage was verified. When the claim was processed, the insurance denied saying the coverage was retro-terminated because the employer didn’t send in notification that the employee had been laid off. In the past, I’ve had denials because the insurance company said the Cobra premiums were not paid. The patient had cancelled checks showing that they did pay the premiums. That fight took me six months to finally receive payment for those outstanding claims. I feel justified in my level of concern for eligibility verification for these government-regulated exchange insurance plans.

Another area of concern for me is precertification. Considering the difficulty regular insurance companies exhibit on occasion, I can’t help but wonder how the governmental connection will affect the precertification process. Just last week, I spent four hours on the phone getting shuffled back and forth between the pre-certification and claims departments of a certain major insurer. The precertification department had told me prior to surgery that no precert was required. I documented the name, date, and time related to this call. Last week the surgery claim was denied because there was no pre-certification. I gave the claims department my documented information and was told that didn’t matter to them because in their system it said precert was required. They said they couldn’t help that the precert department had given me wrong information. I asked if they could get the precert department on the line with us so we could resolve this issue. The response was, “No, we don’t make outgoing calls to other departments.”

So I called the precert department back. They said they were correct, no precert was required and that I should just tell the claims department to pay the claim. I asked if they would please call the claims department for me to verify. That request was met with a prompt, “Once the service is rendered, we are out of the picture.”

Ultimately the issue was resolved, but only because I finally found someone who actually cared about solving the problem and didn’t just pass the buck. I look at instances like this which occur with more regularity that I am comfortable with and I can’t help but think it will there will be worse headaches than this with plans that are overseen by governmental agencies. Maybe we billers should stock up now on aspirin.

My take on the whole Obamacare plan is that making healthcare affordable is a great thing. And if that’s what the Obamacare plan was really doing, I would be more supportive of it. But I think it will do more harm than good. I can very easily see that small businesses will convert employees to part-time status to avoid the penalty. What will that do to families already finding it nearly impossible to stay afloat financially?

I have strong reservations about the government forcing anyone to get health insurance. So many people think that Obamacare is offering free insurance. This is not true. They are forcing you to pay for insurance and the cost of the insurance plans are not readily available. I was just on the healthcare.gov website and I consider myself semi-tech savy. The only way I could find to be able to compare the cost and benefits of the different plans was to actually do your application first. Applying for something before you know the cost is what my dearly departed father would have called "buying a pig in a poke."

It has been my experience in life that people who are trying to manipulate a situation for their own benefit will create a diversion to get your attention off the truth of what they are doing. I think Obamacare has created a diversion with false concern for the health and well-being of the Amercian people. What is its real agenda? It could be simply to rake in more money for the government or it could be something much more sinister. Whatever the case may be, the next several months are going to be very interesting to say the least.