Medical insurance making me responsible for my ER trip
So in the short of it, I am a 21 male in college, I have been fortunate enough to have never had many medical problems and never had to even go to a hospital before. I got a really bad cough and starting having heart palpitations so decided to stop by my local doctors office and have them give me a once over. After drawing some blood and hooking me up to an EKG, the nurse and doctor there rushed into my room and told me that they were noticing a “lack of blood flow” or something to my heart and that it was very serious and I needed to leave and go to the ER immediately and they told me to keep my heart rate low and stay calm. So at this point I’m freaking out because I am deathly afraid of the doctor and hospitals. Anyways, I go up to the ER since it was a Sunday and they immediately check me on their EKG and told me I looked completely fine. They then proceed to do blood work and I waited for 16 hours and no one ever came to saw me. I had obligations to attend to come the next morning so I asked them if it was just okay for me to leave and I could deal with all this and the results later and they said yes. Anyways I get notice of how much my insurance company expects me to pay and it’s the full $3100 dollars and it says on this explanation of benefits paper just some generic stuff about how they found these expenses to not have to be covered by them. My parents told me to wait for the actual bills to come in and then dispute with the insurance company.
So I am doing some research and I find that insurance can not pay your ER bills if it actually wasn’t a serious emergency. It has been a month since my original visit and I had a separate doctor go over my results with me and they said I was completely fine and that it was most likely all from a faulty machine/ faulty operation at the original local doctors office regarding the EKG.
Am I really going to have to pay for all this? I mean the ER visit was all because they were telling me I was in serious condition when I was actually fine. Shouldn’t the local office be responsible? I’m a broke college kid I can’t afford $3100 medical bills for being completely healthy.
