Posted by mtdewcmu on April 13, 2011, at 20:37:28
In reply to Re: Paying for services not yet rendered?, posted by sigismund on April 13, 2011, at 16:25:35
I used to go to this clinic for psychiatry, and I swear the people running it were the crazy ones. For my first few appointments, I showed up on time and I had to wait hours to see the doctor! The first time I waited 2 hours and left, and the next time I waited it out and finally got in. On these days, the waiting room was always full of people waiting around for hours (it served mostly low-income people, so they didn't complain much). Sometimes I would come for my appointment and they would just say, sorry, the doctor didn't show up today. The receptionists did not act professional, either. And then they liked to prescribe brand-name meds, even though I had no insurance and stated that I preferred a generic. Each month the nurse would go searching for enough free samples to fill my prescription. Sometimes there weren't enough free samples around, and I would have to sit there while he called around and tried to scare up meds. Sometimes they would call in a prescription at a local pharmacy. But I never knew how long it would take, and sometimes he told me to come back in a few days. I don't know what they had to do to get so many free samples. I always had the feeling that there was something shady going on. Eventually I found out, quite belatedly, that I was being charged a huge amount of money for the visits, and I thought the county was covering it. I was getting all these mysterious bills from the county that weren't clearly itemized and had seemingly random numbers as my balance. After about 6 months I found out that I was no longer eligible for subsidies and all those random numbers were not cumulative, but were for each visit! There is no way I would have knowingly paid huge sums for such a crappy experience. On the same day that I found out that I had been dropped from subsidies 6 months prior I told them I was discontinuing treatment there. And the girl was surprised. I did not know that such a clinic could operate in the United States. I could see it happening in some corrupt country like Afghanistan. I stopped paying the bills from the county because I couldn't, and I have not heard any more about it.
poster:mtdewcmu
thread:982589
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20110324/msgs/982724.html