Provider told me wrong information and are trying to make me responsible for their mistake

Hey there! Looking for some advice on this.

I signed up for telehealth couples therapy in April with a large provider (not naming names since I’m still trying to dispute this with them). I used my insurance, and I had a $90 copay per session. After the first session, I realized that this would get pretty costly for weekly sessions, so I reached out to their customer support on 5/3. The agent I spoke with told me that because my fiancé (we weren’t married yet) was joining therapy with me, that we could use his insurance since he only has a $25 copay. I emailed over his insurance information and was told by this same agent to upload it to my patient portal so that they could process the new information for our next sessions. We had another two sessions and one missed session, so we would’ve owed another three copays, which should’ve brought our balance to $165 ($90 from my insurance+$75 with his insurance). Instead, the next bill I got was for $360.

I immediately cancelled our next sessions to get this figured out and called their customer support again on 5/29. After I spent 50 minutes waiting to speak with someone who couldn’t tell me why this happened, I finally opened a BBB complaint and got an email back on 5/31 that the team was working to re-verify the benefits.

I got a reply back on 6/2 from a supervisor with the billing support team referencing the BBB review. She told me she understood wanting to update the insurance to use the most efficient benefits, and stated since I was not a dependent on my fiancé’s policy, he could set up his own account and they would transfer the visits over to his account to bill.

I finally reached out again on 7/28 after our wedding and after I was added to his policy on 7/1. I let them know my husband created his account as they requested so we were looking to have everything reprocessed. It took until today for someone from the insurance support team to reach out to me. She called me and long story short, told me that supervisor who said they could transfer the visits was incorrect and she would need to speak with her supervisor about that, then said “worst case scenario you can do a payment plan”.

I am furious and trying to figure out how I can hold the line and not pay this. I thankfully have everything in writing up to this call today and was able to reference each email to the insurance support person I spoke with. What can I say or do for them to either transfer the visits as they promised, or have them write this off? My friend who does collections and billing at the treatment center I work for says I can tell them I’m not paying, but I know they send to collections so I don’t want to do that.

Edited to add: 27 y/o, in Virginia. Income is 60k

submitted by /u/You-Tiny
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