How to proceed with medical collection if not sure if the bill is valid

[linfor]

I am helping my sister with cleaning up her credit. She has a 2 medical collections and she does not recognize the name of the providers. She had surgery around that time so the providers could have been involved from the hospital side.

I wrote to the CAs asking for validation with no response to 2 requests from either.

I sent the medical dispute to the CRAs - 2 deleted the accounts but one says the accounts were verified but did not give any other information. In the interim she paid one of the accounts to the OC since it was only about $20. She paid with a personal check although it did have the endorsements that Whychat recommends. They (the OC) cashed the check.

I am not sure how to proceed. I was thinking to send the paid OC the HIPAA letter with insert B but am not sure if she created any problems by paying the bill.

I was thinking to send the other OC the HIPAA letter with insert C but am not sure if that would be a problem since we still do not know if it is her bill or not.

Help!

Edited February 26, 2006 by linfor

[genseeker]

For my med bills, I wanted to be sure of the amount I owed the provider. So I wrote to the "billing department" and asked for a full acocunting of the account for each member of my family. About a week later, I got full accounting for each of us showing the charges, insurance payments and adjustments and our balance, all with dates included. So I have been paying based upon those statements, not what the CA is claiming. With the medical dispute letter I got response sent to me from the CA (I did not contact them the CRA did) and I discovered that they are using the same date of service for multiple bills. Everyone of DH CA accts list the same date of service but he only saw the dr 1 time that day. The way I look at this info is it is more leverage to force a delete and maybe be able to sue for FCRA violations because I have now disputed 1 X and after paying the accts, I will be sending a reinvestigate letter to the CRA. They are all gone off EX. I also sent the clinic a letter CMRRR (after leaving them) revoking all consent for release of any of our information to anyone. Don't know if it will help but if they contact the CA I can file a complaint for sure because in my state, if you revoke consent , there are only a few very specific reasons (and to whom) they can release info without permission and the CA is not listed, the exceptions are mostly public health type reasons