Which is harder...rocket science or....

Who would have thought that adding a newborn onto your health insurance would be harder than brain surgery and rocket science mixed together. Seriously, we have had nothing but problems with our health insurance since Liam was born. It is so frustrating because 1. Every time I think we finally have everything fixed something else goes wrong 2. I am stuck in the middle between what my HR department is telling me and what the insurance company is saying 3. I have done absolutely everything correct and timely to make this transition and 4. I feel like the pediatricians billing department thinks we are one of those people trying to make excuses for why our insurance isn’t covering stuff.

So let’s start at the beginning. After Liam was born we had 30 days to submit the paperwork to have him added onto my insurance. No problem, we had it down within two weeks. Then we get the first phone call from the ped’s office telling me that they are not seeing Liam on my insurance yet. I assure them that I faxed the paper work over and it should be processing soon. Two weeks later we get a bill, a very large bill from the hospital for Liam showing no payment made from the insurance. So I place call number one to the insurance company. They explain to me that when my HR department submitted Liam’s paperwork that they future dated him to start coverage on Jan 1. They said it could have been a mistake made because I submitted it during open enrollment and someone may have just got confused. They tell me to call my HR, have then resend the paper work with a start date of his date of birth and then they, the insurance company, would reprocess his bills and send them to me. Sounds easy enough right? No. I call the HR department and they tell me they sent the paper work over with Liam’s birth date being his start coverage date, that it was not future dated. Well great, I have one company telling me one thing and the other telling me another, so here I am stuck in the middle with my hands up. In the mean time I have the ped’s office calling me asking what is going on because we have an appointment coming up soon and need to have it figured out by then. Finally my HR department agrees to call the insurance company to get it figured out.

Then today we get a bill from the ped’s office for $210 starting that since our last appointment our insurance was terminated. What the heck? I surely do not remember terminating our coverage. Again I think the problem lies within my HR department. I am on FMLA which means I get no paycheck and have to pay my health insurance by check since there isn’t a pay check to take it out of. After Liam was born I immediately called my HR, told them I was on FMLA and wanted to continue coverage. The women told me she would send me a “coupon” and I would send in the said amount and this would continue until I came back. A few weeks later we got the “coupon” or invoice and we promptly sent out our payment. Since then we have not received another invoice like the women said we would. I believe this is why our coverage was terminated; because we never got the bill sent to us for how much we owed to continue coverage. I understand that in some way this could be my fault for not being proactive enough and calling a week ago when I first got this hunch but I am taking care of a newborn and was told that everything I needed to do had been done. It is just so frustrating. On one hand I am so happy that we switched to Alex’s insurance as of January 1 because now if we have any more problems he can make the calls to get it straightened out but also because when we were on his insurance before I got my job we never had a problem; they are so much easier to work with.

Part of me wants to just pay what we owe and be done with it instead of stepping into the mess I know this is going to be. If it was just Liam’s two month ped visit I would probably just pay it and not deal with trying to fix it but I also had my urgent care trip on the 31st which I know will come back to bite me so I guess my best bet it to try and get it straightened out.

As I said before my biggest gripe with all of this is that I feel like everyone thinks we are the type of people that don’t pay our bills because we have had so many problems. We really could not be any different. If we get a bill we will have the money in the mail the next day. It just frustrates me to know that I did everything I could have done yet we still had and are still having so many issues.

Oh well, here’s hoping come Monday I can get it all figured out! The only good thing that came out of this was that in frustration i cleaned our whole kitchen.


So today I had no luck at Target searching for any ornaments on sale. Last weekend they had so much left and this weekend everything was cleared out. I saw on the news how Target was transforming their holiday section into a Sam’s Club/Cosco like department. It was kind of interesting. They had a lot of bulk items for a fairly good price. I wonder what their goal is in the long run for this addition.

I bought the best sweater at Target today. I am in love with it. Being a SAHM, as awful as it is to admit, I rarely put on regular clothes during the day if we are not going anywhere. I wanted to spruce up my look with outfits that are still comfy but nicer than PJ’s. I love the look of long sweaters and legging, my husband will not let me out of the house it them but that is another story. On the clearance rack today they had these long, big, squishy sweaters. I picked one up along with a new pain of black leggings. As soon as I got home I changed into my outfit and have decided that I am going back tomorrow to buy it in another color as well!

As for a nook update I settled for reading the first book in the Dexter series. So far it is really good; similar but different from the show in a good way.

Alex, who is not a reader at all, started reading The Lovely Bones and said it is really good. I have heard so many good things about the book and it has amazing reviews on amazon but I am reluctant to read it. Why you ask. Because I am a huge wimp! The trailer for the movie scares me and I get nightmares over the littlest things and proceed to then stay up for hours because I am too afraid to fall back asleep. Yes, I am like a 5 year old. Alex and I loved Criminal Minds but had to stop watching it for that reason. If we watch a scary movie or anything that provokes anxiety I have to watch something light before going to bed, no matter how late it is.

Of course no post be complete without a picture of my little man. We went for a car ride with Daddy to get Wii motion plus attachments for our Wii controllers.