Whew!

So I had two letters I didn't want to open. I held on to them for almost a week before I finally peeked inside. One was from the hospital, where I spent 23 hours and 59 minutes in the ER and the other was from my insurance company. It was too early to be the regular bill for my coverage. My last insurance plan was cheap, it was a group plan from work but it took forever to cover the bills and I was always getting dunning notices from the providers. I was afraid to see what was going to happen with these since I'm with a new insurer and I've heard this hospital is not patient about getting paid.

I finally opened them yesterday afternoon, since I found myself unexpectedly home early. I had to laugh. The hospital sent me another survey about my "customer" satisfaction with their service and BCBS sent me a detailed list of the services that were provided to me and what they cost but damn if the bottom line wasn't that I only owed the expected $150 co-pay.

You know I've been paying that $500+ a month for a single policy insurance since January and there have been months I thought, jeez if I wasn't paying this I'd have enough money for a down payment on a little house around here, but it turned out to be a good gamble. At this point, the hospital services cost more than the investment I made in the policy. The lesson being, you get to a certain age, when you have all this wisdom of experience but the physical plant starts to fail, you really can't afford to be without coverage.