Health Care Bills without the agony

credit.com I reviewed a useful health care bill management web service called Simplee.

In recent years, utilities, credit card issuers and banks have made a real effort to redesign their statements so they're easier for their customers to understand. In many cases they've succeeded, and I'm grateful.

But for some reason, my health insurer (Anthem Blue Cross) has continued to to send me the same kind of inscrutable "Explanation of Benefits" letter that it has sent for years. It's filled with information that is of no value to me, including machine-readable bar codes and glyphs (who are these for?—the letters don't say). And the kind of information I would like to know is incomplete. For example, the letters include the "member's medical deductible applied to date" but doesn't say what the deductible actually is, or how much is remaining.

To make matters worse, these laughably named "explanation of benefit" notices don't include a bill to let me pay the outstanding balance on a medical visit. Instead, I receive bills directly from the care provider, which are often sent before the insurance benefits kick in. Other times the bills arrive many months after the service was performed, containing urgent language about how late the bill is, even though it's the first I ever heard about it.

Read the rest at credit.com