<p>Soozievt…chances are, the therapists office isn’t going to have mulitple billing procedures for the same patient. So M3 needs to write them and let them know she’s not responsible for the bills any longer. If D attends and M3 CHOOSES to pay, fine, but she needs to separate herself from the legal responsibility. If the daughter is a young adult, ready to live on her own, next step in life, etc, let her pay the bill if she wants to attend therapy. All that’s happening now is M3 is paying and her D is not attending. If the D attends and M3 CHOOSES to pay, fine, but she needs to separate herself from the legal responsibility.</p>
<p>Mom2M…but I think the larger goal is that the D needs therapy and if D was responsible for ALL appointment fees (not just missed ones), she may opt to never go as it is too expensive. I could see my own kids opting to not go if they had to come up with $100/week for it (they don’t have therapists). But the parents could have D reimburse them directly on the day of missed appointments.</p>
<p>Also, in my view, when I have kids who are in college, health expenses are my responsibility.</p>
<p>I only think the D should pay if she wastes parents’ money by canceling appts. at last minute.</p>
<p>If the family is carrying this student on their health insurance AND the counseling is covered…all the student needs to do is present the health insurance card and it will be covered. The only way the parents would not assume that much of the bill is if they dropped the kiddo from their insurance.</p>
<p>I don’t know about anyone else here but the LAST thing I would do is drop my kid from health insurance if they had no other way to get it. Sorry…that’s something I would pay for.</p>
<p>Thumper,I don’t think anyone has suggested she be dropped from insurance-just that she be responsible for what insurance will not pay. For instance, insurance will not pay for a missed therapy session because no therapy took place. The daughter should have clear consequences if she misses therapy and the therapist charges a cancellation fee(quite common within 24 hours).</p>
<p>Perhaps the counseling is not covered by their health plan. Not all plans cover counseling.Or perhaps the therapist is out of network. Or maybe there is a deductible that must be reached. These are all possible.</p>
<p>I DO think her parents pay for her appointments, when she attends them.</p>
<p>momma-three is saying she is making D pay for missed appointments BUT that D only pays them in person at the office when she goes there and may be avoiding going there to have to pay the bill. I think the parents should make D pay THEM (the parents) the missed fees immediately and since the bills are theirs, pay them on time in the mail.</p>
<p>I happen to think the issue is not just the fees that need to be made up…but if D is not going to therapy, that is not good as she needs it right now. I think there should be consequences if she doesn’t attend. Weekly therapy should be a condition she must meet in order to do X.</p>
<p>Agreement between mom,dad, and daughter/available sons to meet together with therapist or at least some kind of family meeting might be a good thing.</p>
<p>Whatever the family wants to do regarding paying for therapy is a separate issue from letting the therapist know that D is responsible for the bills. I’d pay for the appointments that were kept, but not the missed ones, and I wouldn’t want to be responsible for them.
No where did I mention dropping the daughter’s health insurance,etc. Just letting the therapist know that M3 was not responsible for the bills. In writing.</p>
<p>Mcubed - How is it going tonight? I worry about you and Mr. MCubed.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, soozievt’s proposal about dealing with missed appointments is how we handle it. If S misses an appointment, I still pay the fee to the therapist, but S has to reimburse me. This hasn’t happened often, and I feel a little bad getting reimbursement from my S when it does, because I know that he doesn’t miss appointments on purpose. It is just that he is not the most organized person in the world (to say the least), and he sometimes fails to note an appointment on his calendar and simply forgets. But I do think that it is his responsibility to keep track of appointments, now that he is a young adult.</p>
<p>I am puzzled, momma-three, by your asking that the office call your home. If your D is like my S, the call about an appointment is much more likely to reach her if it is made to her cell phone – right? At least for us, if the call comes in on our home phone, my S might get it, but it is just as likely that he will not be home and would know about it only if I told him. But I don’t see that as consistent with my role. As soozievt pointed out, it seems that you would only need to know about your D’s appointments if you want to take on the task of making sure she keeps her appointments. That degree of involvement might be appropriate in high school, but is not, I think, when the S or D is a young adult. Unless I am misunderstanding the point of having the calls come to your home instead of D’s cell, won’t you end up having to be always on her case about this? That will not help with the level of stress that you are already dealing with.</p>
<p>“I am puzzled, momma-three, by your asking that the office call your home.” - That may be the only way that M3 knows if D is scheduling therapy sessions. Troubled kids often lie to their parents. If med renewals are involved, the situation is especially tricky.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>thumper, I do not think this is 100% correct. I’m covered by H’s insurance as his “dependent”, yet I put my own name in the line “party responsible for payment”. The EOB that get sent to my house is always addressed to H, but the bills from the doctor’s office are addressed to me, and I pay them.</p>
<p>
That is a misunderstanding of the procedures and the law. It has EVERYTHING to do with HIPAA regulations. If doctors offices make courtesy reminder calls to patients, they call the phone number the patient indicates/authorizes as the contact number. Many people no longer have landlines and only have cell phones. The doctors office MUST follow the patients instructions and call the number designated. Otherwise, as many have said, it is a SERIOUS violation of federal healthcare privacy laws.</p>
<p>And btw, apology accepted, m3. I have no clue who asked you questions about your screenname, but it was NOT me. You were sure it was me, but it was not. Again, apology accepted.</p>
<p>jym - many doctors’ offices ask you to provide a series of contact numbers and check all boxes that apply to each number: OK to call, OK to leave detailed message, OK to discuss details with other residents of the house, etc… (I’ve filled out too many of these in the past year!!!). So if the home number was listed as one of contact numbers, there is no reason why a message reminding of the upcoming appointment cannot be left there.</p>
<p>It sounds to me that the appointments with the therapist always get postponed, rescheduled, cancelled the last minute, and m-3 is always left on the hook for the full payment (m-3 says that if the D makes her appt, then insurance pays). If I were in m-3 shoes, I would march into that therapist’s office and demand to remove my name off of their “party responsible for bills” list. It is possible that m-3 is afraid that if she does this and stops her payments for missed appointments, D will not see the therapist at all. However, at the current state of things, the therapy is useless, because D blows off her appointments, and it simply drains m-3’s bank account and results in more friction and stress. If D wants to play wild goose chase games, she should be responsible for the financial aspects.</p>
<p>Trust me on this one-- especially when it comes to therapy appointments where confidentiality reigns supreme, the doctor/therapist office will (or darned wel should) be careful to call who it has permission to call. My forms ask for patient’s home/work/cell numbers a spouse/family members numbers and an “in case of emergency” number, but we are careful to call who we have permission to call, and a in fact have a form that specifically asks if it is OK to leave a message. Privacy rules are not taken lightly.</p>
<p>What jym626 said.</p>
<p>When my daughter was staying at her boyfriends parents house this summer she changed her contact number. The number was never changed back. We pay for her therapy appointments but not the ones she does not go to. The way it works is that our insurance covers her appointments although we do have co-payments which have just gone up again. If a client missed an appointment without cancelling the patient is billed for the appointment because the therapist can not bill the insurance company for services they did not provide. Thus far we owe for d’s missed psychiatrist bill and two therapy apointments. This will make the third missed therapy appointment. </p>
<p>Why do I need to know about the appointments? My daughter does not have a car and to get to the appointment two towns away in the opposite direction of her normal train and bus schedule she will need a ride. I need to know her schedule so that I can drive her to said appointments. I have a schedule with work and I must know a week in advance so that I don’t make appointments during her scheduled appointments. She cancelled this appointment because she “forgot to look” at her new schedule of classes for this semester. There was a clash between therapy and school. Today she has several things going on and last night she was in a rip roaring nasty mood complaining about how she was going to need to travel from here to there and back again than to the next place 1 hour later and on and on. Her schedule makes me dizzy and I said “I know it must be difficult without the car.” My husband does not even hear her and does not respond at all. He gets away with hearing her go on and I am stuck getting the <em>^&</em> end. She is exhausting to listen to.</p>
<p>I only need to know because I will drive her to therapy…not school, not soriorty stuff, not field work, or her jobs. The only place is therapy…so yes I need to know as well when these appointments are.</p>
<p>Your husband hears her he’s just “tuning her out” and not reacting to her rant. It’s just how he copes with the situation. Get an old fashioned printed calendar and hang it in your kitchen or somewhere attach a pen and tell your D to write her appointments in so you can schedule your time.</p>
<p>That calendar has been up on my garage door for years. When I spoke about my daughters organizational difficulties this is a good example. When she first came home I helped her get all types of things in place so that getting to and from places with enough time would be possible, as well as setting realistic goals for what could be done in one day. If she has too much going on she shuts down and forgets all those things that work to help her remember.
Yes he is “tuning her out” and it works so darn well. She doesn’t even bother to engage him unless he lets her know that he does not want to hear her anymore. Than she gives it to him the way I get it. He is really good at just walking away and honestly looking like he does not hear a word. It is a gift because he will live to be 100. I unfortunately hear every little thing that any of my kids say and I can hear it from downstairs and around the bend. I really need to learn how I could hear nothing. The other end of it is that my kids all wish their dad was more hands on with talking to them and cued in to the things they want to discuss. I have discussed this with him and he says that he “talks to them”. I have never heard my husband offer advice or help for any decision they have ever had to make. My husband is however a doer…when they were younger he would drive to the end of the planet to bring them somewhere, sit waiting for hours, order them any books or interesting stuff. Anything that involves doing rather than speaking is right up his ally. They all know he loves them but they don’t speak to him about their decisions or personal lives. They will talk about music, the news, etc… just not feelings.</p>