I work for for a medical billing company. We do only physician billing. One client is, a group pf trauma doctors, they have contracts with only three insurance companies. However when we do send the bill as a non par provider instead of denying the claim as out of network, one company in particular ignores the billing info in box 33 and looks at the rendering provider. If that doctor has a contract they process the bill with that doctors info even though the group as a whole does not have a contract. Can they do that? Whats the point in putting anything in box 33 of the HCFA if they don't process the claim accordingly? Secondly, for another group,I had an MCO, due to a billing error and no npi for the group in box 33,pay a claim, supposedly, to the rendering provider based on info they pulled from his npi. shouldn't the claim be denied so the biller can fix the error? Or can the insurance company just chose then to pay according to the rendering doctors info? The provider never got the money someone cashed the check and we were told we had to request the money from the facility they paid in error. It wasnt even paid to the address in box 33.