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Erica Kahn of Massachusetts was vacationing at the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Arizona last August when she had a spooky encounter with a bat. As she was photographing the night sky, she noticed a group of bats flying around. Then, out of nowhere, one of them flew right up into her face… and into her mouth.
Wait? How did the bat get into her mouth?
As for how the bat got into her mouth? It turned out that it ended up there for a very logical reason. When it got tangled up between her camera and her face, she screamed.
She told KFF Health News that the bat was only in her mouth for a few seconds (she doesn’t know which part of the bat it was), but “it seemed longer.” One can only imagine.
Even though she didn’t think the bat had bitten her, her physician father suggested she get vaccinated against rabies. David Shlim, a travel medicine specialist in Wyoming who studies rabies, told KFF Health News that she made the right decision. “You could hardly have a more direct exposure than that,” he said.
Why didn’t her insurance didn’t cover the medical bills?
Unfortunately for Erica Kahn, that good decision came after a bad one. When she was laid off from her job as a biomedical engineer, she didn’t think she needed to get health insurance. Her logic was that anything happened she would just sign up for a policy then, thinking that she would be covered as long as she got the insurance before going to the hospital. She was wrong.
So, after signing up for a health insurance policy online the day after the bat flew into her mouth, she spent the next two weeks getting rabies prevention treatment at medical clinics and a hospital in Arizona, Massachusetts, and Colorado. Then the bills came.
According to the explanation-of-benefits statements from the insurance company, Kahn owed $20,749. Why? Because “the required waiting period for this service has not been met.” The health insurance policy she had purchased had a 30-day waiting period. It also appears to have been a limited, “fixed indemnity” plan, which isn’t required to meet Affordable Care Act standards.
“I thought it must have been a mistake,” she said. “I guess I was naive.”
Her critical mistake
The thing is, had she purchased a comprehensive health insurance policy, it still probably wouldn’t have covered her treatments. That’s because, as Sabrina Corlette, co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University, told KFF Health News, “The insurance companies — for good reason — don’t want people to wait to sign up for coverage until they are sick.”
On the plus side, said Kahn, “I know what bats taste like now,” adding, “It’s actually a pretty funny story — if it weren’t for the horrible medical bill that came with it.”
Content shared from brobible.com.