Get Gephardt helps Sandy mom sort out insurance confusion that left her with $25K bill

SANDY — One month before her son, Atreus, was born, Catherine Tyler-Horman quit her job to be a stay-at-home mom. She knew there would be challenges, but she wasn't expecting a nearly $25,000 hospital bill for her son's birth.

"So, they took care of his side of the bills okay," she said. "Now it's my side of the bills that they're having the issues with."

To be clear, she still has insurance. When she quit her job, she remained covered by her husband's policy with United Healthcare. But she said United denied her claim, telling her initially that she should go through her old insurance from her old job, the one she quit before her son was born.

But even after she got that sorted out, United Healthcare still denied the claim.

"They came telling me, 'Oh well, we haven't received it so we can't pay it if we don't receive it,'" she said.

So, Tyler-Horman called Intermountain Health, the owners of the hospital where Atreus was born. She asked it to send the bill to her new insurance company. Intermountain told her it did, twice.

"Every time I've called, 'Hey, is this going to collections because it's not being paid on?'" she said. "'No, your file is on hold.'"

Indeed, she did wind up in collections. Not wanting to be forced to pay a bill that she believes her insurer should have paid the lion's share, Tyler-Horman asked me to investigate.

"I don't exactly have 25 grand lying around," she said. "And the longer it sits in collections, the more it's going to affect me and my family."

The KSL Investigators reached out to Intermountain Health on Tyler-Horman's behalf, not through its Billing department but through its Public Relations department. And it had some good news.

In an email, a spokesperson told us it advocated for her with United Healthcare, and it submitted her claim for a third time. That apparently was the charm.

"United finally approved the claim," the spokesperson wrote.

For United Healthcare's part, its spokesperson apologized "for the processing error" on her claims and said it is pleased her "bill has been resolved."

"It's always the same — resend it, resend it, resend it," Tyler-Horman had told us. "Nothing gets done."

Well, this time something got done. She said her portion of that $25,000 bill has dropped down to less than $5,000.

Intermountain Health said the best thing any patient who has had multiple insurance carriers can do is to notify all companies of changes as soon as possible. Don't wait for the bills to roll in after the fact.

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