From time to time, we may have to issue a refund for a patient or insurance payment. The terms for refunds vary, based on the circumstances. This is posted as a legal notice for online credit card payments.
Refund Terms – Insurance Payments
In most circumstances, insurance refunds will be issued without your knowledge, to your insurance company. These occur mostly when an errant payment was issued by the insurance company. In some situations, you may have had other insurance coverage for a particular incident (auto insurance and health insurance) and both paid erroneously.
In all cases where assignment of benefits has been signed (ie, all of our patients) the refund will be issued to the insurance company and not the patient, unless the insurance company instructs us to do otherwise.
Refund Terms – Patient Payments
In most situations a patient is issued a refund because the insurance company assigned a higher deductible or coinsurance than listed on the policy terms. If you believe that you have paid a deductible or coinsurance fee that you were not liable for, you must:
- Contact your insurance company to dispute the allocation.
- Obtain a corrected Explanation of Benefits (EOB)
- Contact us and provide us with a copy of the corrected EOB
When your insurer corrects the payment issued to us, we will issue a refund to the patient in the form that it came to us. In other words, if the patient paid by check, a check will be issued back to the patient. If the payment was received by credit card, the charges will be reversed. If only a partial refund of the payment should be made, however, we will issue such payment by check, in 5 business days, or reverse the entire charge and re-charge the payment amount.
When charges are reversed, there may be a delay (based on our credit card processor) before the money is returned to your account and available for withdrawal.