Health Care Financial Services of TeamHealth

I used to have two medical bills handled by this group. I called once in Dec 2017 to ask if the two accounts could be merged into one and set up and new payment plan for both combined and was told that it was indeed possible to do but that it was going to take a little bit of time because they had to send it to billing services to do it. I was instructed not to do a payment until they were both combined and also advised to call back in a month to check the status. I called back again in 20 days (Jan) to check the status -which was still pending- and to confirm that it was correct the fact that I didn’t have to make a payment. And it was confirmed to me again. I also asked the agent to update my name (which was misspelled) and address, because I was moving in early Feb and double-checked with her that it was good timing to update it. I called back again 10 to 15 days from then and while verifying my information I noted that the address hadn’t changed so I indicated the address change again. The status was OK to proceed so I set up a new payment plan by phone and made the payment right away. I could confirm on the website that both bill numbers were showing under the same account # and that the second account # was not working anymore. Unfortunately, the accounts were merged in such way that it was impossible to split the amount into the two bills. So whenever you made a payment for both, it went all straight up to only one bill and the other one got nothing. But that is not all. In Feb I received a Final Notice letter in my new address that appeared to be delivered late and when I called back to check that this was just a mistake (as I was looking at the payments online) I was acknowledge that both accounts were sent to a collections agency. I spoke to an agent, a supervisor and someone from billing services, and they all had different reasons as to why my account was sent to a collections agency. ‘I don’t have all the records of each time you’ve called’, ‘It was sent to collections because there is no official record that you’ve set a payment plan on the phone’, ‘It was sent to collections because the address came back as not valid’, ‘Two accounts can not be merged, that is not possible. I am sorry that you were told otherwise’, ‘It was sent to collections because we didn’t see a payment for both accounts coming through’ ‘We did not make any mistake, it was only misinformation!’. Are some of the ‘answers’ I’ve heard. I ended up handling this straight with the collections agency that my accounts were sent to because of the lack of efficiency of this group. The supervisor and the billing person were not trying to fix any problem at all nor to own any mistake on their end. They were more focused in apologizing for how I was feeling… Completely upset and disappointed.