CityMD is charging me $300 for checking my pulse and BP
I’m 25F living in NY. Last year, a doctor I saw via telemedicine needed me to give her a new blood pressure and heart rate reading before she could send in a prescription for me. I didn’t have a BP cuff so she recommended I go into an urgent care to get my numbers checked. I went into a CityMD and asked if they would take my BP and HR for free and they said yes, but I guess I checked in on one of their iPads and they had my insurance info from previous visits. Someone let me into a room, took my blood pressure, and I wrote it down and left. This was in October 2021.
A few months later, I started getting bills from CityMD and I’m not proud of it, but I ignored them for months. I finally decided to call them and deal with this. The CityMD billing agent told me that they charged this like any urgent care visit because they have an agreement with all major insurance companies to charge $300 for all visits, and not based on what services were actually done. My insurance, Aetna PPO through my dad’s employer, denied to cover this because it wasn’t an emergency. The agent advised me to ask my doctor’s office to call Aetna and tell them my doctor told me to go to an urgent care immediately so I could get a medication I needed. He said if Aetna still denies this, there’s nothing CityMD can do. (I called my doctor’s office and they said they’ll try to do this.)
Does anyone have any advice on how to fight this bill?
tl;dr, CityMD is charging a full urgent care visit for a blood pressure cuff reading, Aetna won’t cover it, how do I get out of $300