Received a medical bill after ~3 years

My wife received a medical bill from an ER visit from ~3 years ago for ~$12000. She had employer insurance from Cigna and she was also covered as a spouse from Kaiser through my employment.

During the visit she may have provided details of both. The clinic tried to charge Kaiser first and they were asked to contact Cigna as a primary insurer were told that she was listed as a dependent on theirs. Cigna communicated that Kaiser was her primary. Now the clinic is giving my wife an arbitrary deadline of 10 days to reclassify the payment as self-pay unless requests the insurers to update “coordination of benefit records”.

This sucks first off. This happened to her before and has already paid 4k for another such instance when she had dual coverage and could not get clear answers to resolve after numerous calls with medical clinic as well insurance company. Decided to pay herself and get out of the hassle of dealing with insanity of clerical nonsense.

We’re privileged to do so this instance too but 12k is a lot and we want to resolve this without paying ourselves. We also think this can happen again because there is one more visit she had during her time of dual coverage for which we have heard no communication.

Questions Any experience of dealing with such situations? Are emails better? What could she do to minimize being on calls and invest least amount of time to this?

submitted by /u/bhishman
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