clinic

today went well. kisu did not elaborate, so i assume that there was no trouble with the referrals. i spent yesterday trying to get them straightened out. hap requires a valid referral for us to see anyone besides our family doctor. when you have a recurring issue, like, say, leukemia, which requires several visits to a specialist, you have to have a permission slip from your doctor. thankfully, they hand these out in 6 month batches. normally, the doctor's office logs a referral on the insurance company's server and the clerk at the specialist's office downloads it. only at our clinic, they insist that we call the doctor's office and have them FAX one over to the specialist. then the people at the doctor's office get mad and say 'we don't have all day to babysit a fax machine. why can't they get it off the server?' meanwhile, my child is waiting to have treatment....fortunately, the nurses and doctors in the clinic don't concern themselves with things such as insurance paperwork and administer treatment anyway. for this reason, i recieved a statement from hap saying that we might be responsible for the treatment on one visit because the referral had expired. WHAT? this confusion/frustration was compounded by the hassle poppa received last week at the clinic visit by a substitute clerk who could not find pooka's referral in the file. HELLO?! it was there last week. what happened to it? so i have acquainted myself with hap's website and discovered that i can print out any referral in our medical history. i promptly did so and put spare copies of the relevant paperwork in pooka's binder. during my research, i found that the visit for which i received a 'pre-bill' was covered under a valid referral. who dropped the ball there?