Mary had better not get those teeth knocked out when she's ten...

Absolutely, positively ridiculous. The saga of the unpaid tooth extraction continues.

Today was the day that the dentist's office was prepared to send our $59 bill to collections. I didn't remember this until yesterday, and realized that DMBA had not yet paid them off.

I called the Dentist's office today, at 1pm, and found out the balance was still outstanding. They confirmed that lacking money in hand, the bill would go to collections. She offered to take care of it over the phone, but I figured that would rob me of making scene about it, so I told her I would prefer to bring the payment in.

I called DMBA and explained that I had already had multiple hour long conversations with them about this, so the lady looked at the call log to figure out what was going on. (In case anyone is interested, it's tooth #N that has not yet been paid for.) She looked at the payment side of something, and indicated that the claim was number 7 in the queue, and would be paid out today or tomorrow.

I went down to the dentist's office at 1:40pm to pay the money (thus giving up) and to raise a stink about it, since it's their fault this got messed up in the first place. When I got there, the front door was locked and the lights were all out. I tried calling again, and just got an answering machine. This is the point that the "Absolutely positively ridiculous" state got reached.

I called an hour later to ask if their office was open, and found out that the dentist was not in the office today. So much for raising a stink. I would much rather have an audience for that little conversation. I went back down to pay, and when she asked how I would like to pay, I assked her what exactly the procedure was for my getting my money back once DMBA pays in the next 2 days. She said something about a cabinet, and someone who cuts checks every month. Then she said that they have all kinds of problems getting DMBA to pay for extractions. I said "No you don't," and she said something about the other 30 families that are having problems. Not wanting to get completely into it without the audience I wanted, I gave her my card, she processed the money. Then she said something about DMBA not paying for any extractions, my reply was "Yes, they do." I stapled my receipt to the printouts of the claims and left.

I plan to go back tomorrow to try to talk to the dentist. If he's not there, I will return Wednesday. I want to make it perfectly clear to them that they were the ones that billed the exact same thing 4 different times. They billed twice in November, with different dentist's names on the bill, for some reason. DMBA rejected both, one labeled as "More explanation required". I explained this to them in December, they just billed out again, DMBA rejected as a previously billed claim. In February, when I yet again called the dentist's office and explained what happened, I asked them if they could contact DMBA to figure out what happened. Their response was to bill out a 4th time, DMBA rejected again.

It's 6 months now since Mary had her teeth pulled and the other girls had their teeth cleaned. The silly thing here is that sometime later this week, I am sure we will get a postcard from the dentist's office telling us it's time for a checkup. It's all very silly.