Medical Billing Forum
General Category => General Questions => : rlopez32 August 02, 2011, 03:56:51 PM
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Hello Ladies!!
I have a question about California Medi-Cal.
I recently started working for a Neurologist that has a lot of outstanding balances for Medi-Cal patients. He only became effective with Medi-Cal last year. He is an on-call physician at our local hospital and obviously had to see some Medi-cal patients when he wasn't effective. My question is can we bill these patients after the fact since we were not effective with Medi-Cal at the time of service? Or did the patient need to sign consent prior? That seems hard in a hospital setting. I have told him that these will end up all being write offs. He wants to make sure we can not bill the patient. Where would I go to find out the laws pertaining to this situation?!
Thanks ladies!!!
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That varies by state and I'm not sure with California. In many states you are not supposed to treat Medicaid patients if you are not a Medicaid provider and therefore you could not bill the patient. Anybody know about California??
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If it is a covered benefit, and you took the patient KNOWING they were Medi-cal AND you are not participating in Medi-Cal at the time you provided services, you CAN NOT bill the patient.
He CAN bill the patient's who received services once he became a participating provider. The rest is a write off, sorry. The only good thing is that the write off shouldn't be too much as Medi-Cal has HORRIBLE reimbursement.