Medicaid Nightmare Ends

So!

Guess who I got a call from on Friday last week?  The Medicaid lady, Helen.  We had had a long chat the previous week about my case, and how I shouldn't have had a spenddown because I applied for prenatal medicaid, and they put me on the wrong plan and blah blah blah.  She was a little more competent than most of the reps I had talked to previously, but she still didn't understand what I was saying essentially.  She said she would take my case to an eligibility specialist supervisor, and they would work it out.  So when she called me, they said they reprocessed my case, saw that I had indeed been put on the wrong plan by no fault of my own, and that my income was indeed below the limit.  Hmmmm……isn't that what I had been saying all along??  So she assured me the claim would be reprocessed with the correct info.

Then, the next day, I got a card in the mail.  It was my medicaid card for OCT 2010.  Coverage!  Yeay!

Then this morning, got another call.  Another claims supervisor, Elizabeth, who I had left a message with two weeks ago.  She also wanted to let me know my case had been fixed.  And this was my favorite part:  "I don't get it, I have no idea why you were put on a spenddown program if you applied for prenatal.  There is no spenddown on the prenatal medicaid, our case worker made a mistake initially, I'm sorry for the trouble it caused…."  Wow!!!!  She got it!  After 6 months and a million phone calls with people telling me I had no idea what I was talking about, someone finally understood, said I was right, and apologized.  Best day ever!

So just to make sure, I called IHC and asked if they had been contacted or if they had contacted medicaid.  They said Elizabeth had called them and said that medicaid was going to reprocess the claim and pay in full.  Woohoo!  No collections for me!  Dang, I love being right!  And soooo glad this nightmare is finally over.