The Bill Our Town Paid In Secret

We had already tried the normal channels. I want to say that plainly, because people who have never been in it assume you just didn’t try hard enough. We applied for the hospital’s charity care program the first week home. A woman in financial counseling ran our household income against the chart on her clipboard and told us, not unkindly, that we were four hundred dollars a year over the cutoff. I asked whether the medical debt itself counted against our income, and she said no, it did not, that the chart only looked at what came in. We filed an appeal anyway. It was denied. Four hundred dollars. I make enough at the co-op to put us four hundred dollars a year too high to get help, and not enough to pay thirty eight thousand dollars without selling things we needed.

We had set up a payment plan too, three hundred and ten dollars a month for ten years, which the billing office called “manageable” and which felt, some nights, like being told a boulder was manageable because you only had to carry it a little ways every single day for the rest of your life.

So on that Tuesday night Amber had her legal pad and her three columns, and I was leaning against the counter not drinking a glass of water I’d poured twenty minutes before, when the phone rang.

Pam From Billing

I almost didn’t answer it. It was after seven, and the hospital billing office never called after five. I answered anyway, the way you answer anything when your daughter has had surgery six weeks ago and your body has not caught up to the fact that she’s safe now.

“Mr. Reichert? This is Pam, from patient financial services at Wesley.”

“Is something wrong with the account?”

“No, sir. The opposite, actually.” I heard papers shuffle on her end. “I’m showing your balance at zero. I wanted to call you myself instead of just letting the statement go out, because I figured you’d have questions.”

I did not say anything for a second, because my first thought, the only thought a person in our position has room for, was that something had gone badly wrong in their system and I was about to find out the hard way.

“There’s no way that’s right,” I said. “We owe thirty eight thousand dollars.”

“You owed thirty eight thousand and twelve dollars as of last Friday,” Pam said. “A payment and an adjustment posted Monday morning that brought it to zero.”

“We didn’t make a payment.”

“No, sir. It wasn’t from you.”

Amber had put her pen down. She was watching my face the way you watch a weather radar when the color on the screen changes fast.

“Then who made it?”

“I’m not able to say,” Pam said, and her voice had a little catch in it, like she wished she could. “The payment came in through our community assistance fund, and the donor requested anonymity. That’s their right, and I have to respect it. It’s the same for everybody who gives through that fund, whoever they are.”

“Pam, I have to know who paid my daughter’s hospital bill.”