[ACEsthetics] New Post/Thread Notification: Dental Insurance: Friend or Foe?

Hello,

TonySoileau has just posted in the Dental Insurance: Friend or Foe? forum of ACE Dental World under the title of How would you handle this guy?.

This thread is located at http://www.acedentalforum.com/forum/threads/1772-How-would-you-handle-this-guy

Here is the message that has just been posted:
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How would you handle this situation. A guy comes in yesterday about 4PM. He is upset that we turned over to collections. He was last see two years ago. Claims a former employee of mine guaranteed him his insurance covers entire cost of his cleaning. Phone calls, letters, etc all sent to him. He does not think he has to pay. Now he gets a collection letter. He comes in and wants to talk to me. In the past I have handled this many ways. I have gone talk to the patient. I have tried using my best verbal poo poo to feel his pain and explain insurance. Never worked. Patient could care less. Just believes I should only take what his insurance pays even if its nothing. Total waste of my mental energy with this option. Second option when I talk to patient is to wimp out, feel his pain, feel sorry for the loooooonnnnnnggggggg list of personal problems they always seem to be facing, write off the bill with the promises he will be a good paying patient from now on. I eat the bill. He either never comes back or every time there is a fee he "wants to speak to the doctor about it" and my team gets no respect from him. Again a complete waste of my mental energy. Now I choose to spend my energy on my good patients and let my team handles these cases. If I have sent him to collection I expect to *not* get paid anyway. So every year at this time I kinda rethink how I handle dead beats. They all tell really good stories so I am sure a few of them are really good people in financial strain. But the vast majority of the ones I see are marsh trash. And its really hard to tell the good from the bad. So I just focus on the ones I know are good because they are paying their bills. What any of you went talk to the guy or would you let your team handle it?
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