Arise/Westlake kept our $8,000 hostage for 19 months!…read more
Billing, billing, billing.
Notice that almost all the bad reviews about Arise are about billing.
When you go to Arise or Westlake Hospital, please never pay anything up front! They will tell you that they will bill insurance and if you overpaid, you will get a refund. But, that seems to never be true, based on reading the reviews here and based on our experience.
(Arise handles billing and insurance for Westlake Hospital, we found out a year after a surgical procedure at Westlake).
If insurance ever gets billed, and if you ever get a refund, it will only be after many calls and much work and nagging on your part.
And, since you won't receive a bill from Arise/Westlake (because you pre-paid and nothing is owed), you will be in the dark about what the charges are, and you won't even know if insurance was billed or not because you don't know what the charges are!
Did we get a refund? Yes, after 19 months of calls, emails, frustration, and visiting the Arise billing office in person, we finally got our overpayment of $8,000+ refunded to us.
What went wrong?
1) Arise never even billed our insurance for the wrist surgery.
They were not motivated to bill insurance because we had already paid them for the procedure. We finally got them to bill the insurance after a year of calling, and finally visiting the Arise office in person. We were extremely lucky that the insurance paid the bill even though it was filed slightly more than 12 months after the procedure.
2) Arise had to "approve" the billing of insurance for the procedure!
What? Why? I don't know. Thankfully, they "approved" it, but I've never even heard of such. Billing insurance for a procedure should be automatic, right??
3) When I called Westlake about billing the insurance, the person I talked to couldn't actually send a bill to insurance, and couldn't tell us if the bill had been sent. Why? Because she worked for Westlake. And, Arise handles the billing. This problem seemed completely insurmountable. We didn't know that Arise handled the billing. We didn't understand the problem.
Finally, we drove to Westlake to talk to someone in person about billing, and we were told that we had to drive over to Arise instead.
After talking to folks at Arise, we finally understood why it was useless to call the billing department at Westlake.
4) After Arise finally billed insurance, and our insurance fully paid for the procedure, we were then told "Your money is not refundable".
Nobody ever wants to hear that. The person was wrong and they never should have said something like that. It would have been insurance fraud to not refund our money after they received payment for the same procedure twice (once from us; once from insurance).
5) After Westlake/Arise agreed to refund our money, it took almost 60 days to receive a refund check in the mail. This is in violation of the law in Texas which requires the patient be refunded their money within 30 days of recognizing that the patient is due a refund.
6) Fundamentally, there is a BIG BIG problem here. The billing of the insurance should happen automatically, and should not have required any phone calls or in-person visits. And, refunding a customer over-payment should occur automatically.
Nothing ever happened without our interference.
It is as though I was their unpaid employee working for countless hours on my own behalf.
Without my intervention and numerous hours spent they would have done nothing at all.
I can't possibly write about all the aggravation, frustration, and time spent on this problem. If we had taken no action, we would never see our $8,000 refunded for sure.
