HUDSONVILLE, Mich. — A Hudsonville man who recently lost his wife to cancer is now fighting with two providers over a $1,600 bill.
He tells FOX 17 the issue is one group is saying they sent the bill, but then the insurance company never got it.
“She liked to sing, she liked to play piano. She was outgoing and friendly,” Allen Vander Molen said of his late wife, Kimberly Jo.
The two were married for 32 years.
Last June after feeling ill, doctors diagnosed her with cancer. She had five masses in her brain and quickly ended up on hospice.
“And she went to have chemo, stem cell transplants, radiation, and probably blood transfusions and stuff, and they said she would not be the same again,” said Allen.
He tells me Kimberly paid her medical bills on time and had insurance throughout the month of June when she had some lab work done.
Her bills were high, and she quickly met her deductible.
“She paid her insurance bill the first of the month, and she’d be covered until the end of June,” he said. “It seems like I’m getting the runaround and it’s kinda flustrating; where do I go? Because you don’t want your credit rating ruined because of this.”
Kimberly passed away on August 11 at age 57.
Allen got a $1,625 dollar bill for that lab work his wife had done back in June.
He contacted Pathology Associates of Grand Rapids saying it should’ve been covered by Kimberly’s insurance company Cigna.
“I call them, and they said, 'Well, they sent the bill to her insurance, which is Cigna, and I call Cigna, and Cigna says they never received the bill,” he said.
He then made a copy of the bill himself and sent it to Cigna and still says the company claims it never got it.
“I feel like I’m getting the runaround because I don’t know how you can send a bill, and it’s getting lost because I even mailed it to them.”
He tells me he never got anywhere with Pathology Associates or Cigna, so he mailed a letter into the FOX 17 Problem Solvers asking for help.
“Well, I’ve been trying to solve this on my own and it’s not working. I tried my representative in Lansing, and I never got a letter back from him. I asked him where could I go for help, and he never sent me a response back, so I figured, 'Hey, I’ll try Problem Solvers.'”
It's now been a back-and-forth struggle with both companies for five months and he doesn’t understand it.
He says Kimberly’s insurance paid a $150,000 bill but isn’t answering him on this one. He just wants it all figured out.
“Eventually somebody’s gonna want that money. You know, it’s hard enough when your wife dies, and then you have to deal with insurance companies that don’t want to pay the bill,” he said.
RESPONSE FROM PROVIDERS
I got ahold of both companies.
The billing department for Pathology Associates would not comment due to HIPAA laws even though Allen gave me all the information.
But he says the billing department called him after we reached out, saying his wife’s last name did not have a space in it (VanderMolen, not Vander Molen), so it’s now corrected that and processing the bill.
Cigna tells me:
“Thank you for bringing this to our attention. The bill the customer received was for a claim not previously received by Cigna. We requested the claims from Pathology Associates of Grand Rapids, which we are now in receipt of and will process per the members plan benefits."
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