It is not hard for a Medicare recipient with a supplemental plan to determine if the balance of his hospital or doctor bill gets covered by Medigap. The procedure is exactly the same process a person with any other would use. If a person wants to know if Medigap and Medicare covered all the costs of a procedure, he just has to wait for his bill.
Any hospital or doctor bill will contain information about charges. If the bill contains any amount other than $0, a person knows that his full balance was not covered by Medigap.
If a person receives a relatively small bill from his doctor’s office, the best course of action is to simply pay it. A few dollars does not make much of a difference in most people’s budgets.
If the bill is for policies that either Medicare or Medigap should cover, the policy holder may need to launch an investigation as to why the claim was denied. It could be that paperwork was filled out correctly or that the insurance company incorrectly denied a claim. The first cause is far more common than the latter, consult the hospital or the doctor’s office to see if they can do anything to resolve the issue.
If a Medicare recipient suspects that an unpaid Medigap balance resulted from a mistake on the part of the insurance company or the medical staff, he should not expect the company to admit the error easily. If a customer can prove that an unpaid Medigap balance was the result of a paperwork error, he still has to fight through bureaucracies and occasionally human egos to get the medical paperwork error fixed.