We had the baby, now we gotta pay for everything. I’m good with this, it’s part of the package.

But this thing where they send us hospital bills from 73 different places is annoying as balls. We stayed at one hospital. All the people we dealt with were associated with the same hospital. But we keep getting all these bills from different places.

In just the past three weeks we’ve gotten bills for the following amounts:

– $570
– $200
– $2.80
– $380.80

And we pay them (thank you FSA), but what I find disconcerting about this practice is that I have no idea when it will end. We literally have no idea how many different departments we dealt with or how many departments were called in or utilized by the departments that we were dealing with. We got one bill three weeks ago and the others in the last few days. There are more bills coming, but how many? Nobody fucking knows.

Friends I’ve spoken to recently have told me it does no good to call the hospital and ask what other bills to expect because the people in Billing don’t know anything until the bill is created. And there are some cases where if you dealt with the same department twice over the course of a few days, but around their billing cutoff for the month, you will get two bills, but a month apart. I understand that, but again, since we won’t know if our doctors utilized these departments or not, we can’t plan for it.

Irksome.