During what should have been one of the happiest times of her life, Alexis Corrica was feeling “stressed out the whole time.”
Now 23, the Maryland health worker, who’s studying to become a registered nurse, was getting pressured – by the hospital where she had just delivered her daughter – to pay a bill of several thousand dollars.
It was a bill Alexis had no idea she might have to pay until after her daughter was born, and she had been told beforehand that it would be covered by insurance.
That was in early 2022, and Alexis was getting no help at all from her hospital. “It seemed like every two weeks I was getting the same bill, reminding me that I owed them $6,000.”
But thanks to a TikTok video about how Alexis could seek help with her mistaken bill, she heard about Dollar For. The national nonprofit helps patients like Alexis get legally mandated charity care from nonprofit hospitals.
“That was a saving grace for me. It would have been very hard for me to scrounge up all that money for them,” Alexis says.
Her story of how she got the huge hospital bill sounds like one big fiasco.
Before the birth, Alexis checked to see if she should get separate insurance for the baby. Her insurance company told her the baby would be covered automatically under her policy.
But later, literally while holding her two-day old daughter in her arms, Alexis suddenly was hit with the news that because she was on her parents’ insurance plan and was not the plan’s primary cardholder, the baby in fact was not covered. The baby’s bill was over $6,000.
Alexis then applied for Medicaid. She was granted Medicaid retroactively a month after the baby was born, but she says the hospital told her it had no record of that.
Alexis even had Covid around the time her baby was born, and while her little girl wound up testing negative for Covid, she wasn’t allowed to go to the hospital nursery due to concerns she might have the virus. Still, Alexis was billed around $4,000 for nursery services she had never been able to use for her baby.
She kept trying to sort things out herself, calling the hospital and applying for financial assistance. She says she thought of the hospital at the time, “I’m spending more time with you on the phone than I am with my own baby.”
Alexis’ initial application for charity care was denied. The reason given was that maternity care wasn’t “medically necessary”. Dollar For helped Alexis dispute that rejection. (Holy Cross Hospital has since acknowledged that maternity care is necessary, and has retrained its staff to accept applications from new mothers.)
Then, with Dollar For on her side, Alexis was able to prove that she had applied for and been accepted for Medicaid within the required time period. Eventually, Holy Cross eliminated her bill.
Now, Alexis and little Amariah can move forward.
“Since you guys came in and started helping me, it’s felt a lot better, and I’ve felt a lot more optimistic,” she says.
Hospital bills for childbirth? See how Dollar For helped new mothers Savannah and Karla crush their bills.