Complaint Review: Professional Claims Bureau

This agency was employed by the Good Samaritan Hospital of West Islip, Long Island to collect a $457 bill that I supposedly owe the hospital for a visit to their emergency room over Labor Day weekend of 2008. My insurance company had already fully paid a bill amounting to $4,026 to Good Samaritan in November of 2008, but there was apparently a separate bill for $457 - whose existence I had no way of knowing about - from a different billing department at the hospital that had been "repeatedly sent to me" and that I have failed to pay. The reason why I "failed to pay" was because I never received any of those bills. The reason why I never received any of those bills, as I have subsequently found out directly from the hospital, was because the hospital's billing department was apparently too stupid to know that Ontario is a province of Canada, rather than Canada being a province of Ontario. But that is a separate report about the hospital that I will file as soon as I am done with this one.

Getting back to Professional Claims Bureau Inc., first of all, they used a machine to call me. The machine pronounced my name so wildly differently from what it is that I didn't even know they were looking for me - I only phoned the number they left to ask them to stop calling my house and taking up all the space on the answering machine with their stupid messages. Then I was told that, actually, it was me they were looking for, and that was the first time I knew of the existence of a second hospital bill. The woman I spoke to was incredibly rude from the first minute. She did not give me any useful information - for example, who is the bill actually from? - but instead kept on telling me that I was "not being collected upon for no reason" and that she was "not going to argue with me" about whether I ever received the bill or not. She then asked, in the most insultingly skeptical tone of voice, who my health insurance carrier was. When I told her the name of the company, she demanded that I give her my policy number & all relevant information. I refused on the grounds that I was under no obligation to provide private information to someone I knew nothing about and who had thus far not provided one shred of documentation to prove that such a bill existed and that she was authorized to collect on it. She ended by making some kind of threat about some report - which I now retrospectively believe must have been my credit report - and ended the conversation. Strange that the business (if such a scumbag operation can be graced with such a dignified name) should be called "Professional Claims Bureau." They were really anything but professional.

Old brock dweller
Claremont, Ontario
Canada