Please read the entire journal.

I have been denied the Hardship assistance.

Reading that, you're probably all thinking the same thing I was at the time I read it. "Why did I get denied?" Well, here's the thing, while I was denied the assistance, the reason is because, apparently, I never needed it to begin with.

I'm going to start things off with something that happened about two weeks ago. I'd not brought this up before now because I was uncertain of what circumstances led to it happening. I had received a new bill statement in the mail. When I looked at the bill though, I noticed that it was much less than it originally was; the cost having gone down by about half. I didn't quite understand this, because I had made zero payments toward the bill yet because I was still trying to sort out the details of getting assistance. I logged into my patient portal and left a message with billing to ask them about this. In doing this, I also noticed something very odd. Normally, my patient portal shows the amount I still have left to pay right on my main page. Now, though, it didn't show the original amount. It didn't show the NEW amount either though. In fact, any sign of the bill was gone from my portal page entirely. Even looking under the billing section showed $0 owed. This happened on the 15th, with the bill itself dated 12/8. I didn't notice the date on the bill until an hour after having sent the first message to them though, and when it occurred to me the lower bill couldn't have been a result of the hardship (because my stuff wasn't mailed out to them until the 13th, five days after the bill had been printed) I sent an additional message asking them what was going on.

The upshot was, at the time, I was told to call their Financial Counseling Dept and inquire directly. The problem was the number I was given for this is the same number I'd already told the very same person that had just wrote that to me, that that specific department no longer handles the hardship cases themselves. But neither they nor the person I was speaking to knew where I needed to go from there, so I was stuck just waiting until I got more information, either from the department itself or via mail.

So, where did that leave me? Well, I woke up from a nap tonight to see that I had an e-mail indicating I had a new message on my portal from the Financial Counseling department. I started getting really nervous and upset even before I read it, but did my best to hold it together as I logged in and looked. There, on the portal was a PDF file of a letter from them indicating I had been denied the Financial Assistance. Reading that made me more upset, but I forced myself to keep reading. What followed was the reason why: Medicaid had already 100% covered the bill. I was denied because I never needed it.

I was a mixture of wanting to cry and wanting to scream out from being so happy. Having read the letter, I have my assumption as to what happened. My guess is Medicaid could only cover so much of my bill per month, so, once Medicaid had paid part of it, the hospital must have sent out the new bill, hence the lower amount, but the next cycle on my Medicaid must have kicked in before the new bill had actually reached me, so my account had been cleared of the debt before the bill had gotten to me yet. I have no idea if this is ACTUALLY why it happened, but the fact remains that the bill was fully covered. I owe nothing on the bill.

As a side note, to anyone wondering, I have saved the electronic copy of this letter to my computer, in the file that I've stored all the Financial Assistance documents I had put together for all of this, so that if, by some highly unlikely chance, they try to come back to me demanding that I pay the bill, I can present this letter that states, in their own words, that the bill was 100% covered.

I can't tell you guys how relieved I feel right now.