I received a check, payable to me, from a former patient’s insurance company. What should I do?
I’m am out-of-network provider, so don’t presume to speak for the obligations that an in-network provider might face, but….
It happens a supervisee of mine faced an almost identical situation yesterday. In this instance, what he did, after discussing was:
- contact the patient to confirm they didn’t want to return to treatment (because, had they wanted to, cashing the check and applying a credit to their account would have been an option); and
- having confirmed the patient didn’t wish to return to treatment, return the check to the insurance company with a note indicating the money properly belonged to the patient, requesting that a check be issued directly to the patient, and cc’ing the patient.
In general, I prefer to avoid cashing insurance checks for two reasons:
- Those insurance company people are a pain in the butt to deal with, often harassing me by phone. Anything I can do to minimize the claim they have on my time is a positive. For example: they often want a W9 if they’ve sent me checks. I don’t particularly enjoy filling out and sending W9s, never mind sitting on (hold on) the phone with their call centers with poor connections, long latency delays, and underpaid, undertrained staff who have only one model of medical office in their mind, and it’s most definitely not mine.
- I really really like, from a clinical perspective, for the relationship I have with my patient to be between me and my patient. Adding a third party to the relationship muddies the transference in ways I like to avoid.
I occasionally confront this situation with continuing patients as well. In that instance, my clinical instinct – to return the check to the insurance company – usually is trumped by my basic human sympathy for my patient, and an appreciation that returning the check likely will result in, at best, a several-week or -month delay in their getting their money, and so I usually cash the check and apply it to my patient’s account. I suppose if the check were to be large relative to the ongoing cost of treatment, I might think twice, as on some level, accepting prior payment for service not yet rendered establishes my patient as a lender to me – just as billing monthly establishes me as a lender to my patient, to a degree. But that hasn’t happened to a degree that has concerned me.
Good luck.
