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Digging out from under piles of medical paperwork gives these families more time for living.

Carolyn and Ed Burnett were on vacation in Florida with their 2-year-old son, Edwin, when they noticed some small bruises on the boy's legs. When the Burnetts returned home to Wilmington, N.C., they received devastating news from their pediatrician: Edwin had leukemia.

Over the past year and a half, the Burnetts have been consumed with Edwin's treatment, which includes daily chemotherapy and weekly trips to the University of North Carolina Hospitals at Chapel Hill, two and a half hours away. While they braced themselves for the physical and emotional toll of dealing with a sick child, they didn't reckon on the stress involved with handling all the paperwork, which was almost as overwhelming as the disease itself.

"The mailbox was filled with bill after bill from doctors, pharmacies, hospitals, emergency rooms and labs," says Carolyn, "and we couldn't decipher them." On the recommendation of a friend, she called Patricia Pane, owner of Medical Insurance Assistance, one of a growing number of private bill-paying services that help consumers plow through paperwork, appeal denied medical claims and get the most out of their health-insurance coverage.

When Pane first visited the Burnetts, she found them sitting on their living-room floor surrounded by stacks of paper. Pane gathered up the bills and insurance statements in a shopping bag and carted them away, leaving Carolyn and Ed with her two rules of doing business: Once you turn over your paperwork to me, don't worry about it anymore--and don't pay any bill until I tell you.

The Burnetts were more than happy to follow her advice. Edwin's medical bills for 1998 totaled nearly $113,000. Of that, Pane identified about $9,000 worth of billing errors and used the credits to reduce the Burnetts' outstanding balance. She also negotiated discounts on their behalf with doctors and health care facilities, so their out-of-pocket costs were held to about $4,000 for the year.

Pane, who charges $60 an hour for her services, also recovered health-insurance benefits for medical bills incurred by Carolyn, Ed and their newly adopted daughter, Grayson. All told, the Burnetts paid Pane about $2,300 last year and think she was worth every penny.

Now that they have eliminated the backlog, the Burnetts just bundle up their medical bills each week and drop them off with Pane. She makes sure that all their medical-insurance claims have been properly processed before telling the Burnetts when and how much to pay. That way they don't have to apply for a refund if bills are overpaid, and they aren't confronted by threatening phone calls and letters from creditors demanding payment.

"It gives you a wonderful feeling to be able to take that burden off people so that they can devote more time to the care of the sick family member without worrying about their bills being paid," says Pane, who started her business five years ago following a career as a benefits administrator for DuPont.

Saving time and money

Pane says it became evident to her during her previous career that consumers need an advocate in the increasingly complex area of health insurance. Add to that the time constraints on busy working couples (who often have to juggle two health-insurance plans) and an elder generation turning to adult children for assistance, and you have a natural market for a new group of service providers, generally known as claims-assistance professionals.

"As baby-boomers like me get older, we don't necessarily have as much time as we'd like for our parents or ourselves, so we hire people to do things," such as file income-tax returns and sort through medical bills, says Susan Dressier of the Alliance of Claims Assistance Professionals (ACAP), a fledgling nonprofit organization in Wheaton, Ill., that recommends a code of ethics for members and hopes to offer professional accreditation by early 2000. (For a referral to an ACAP member or advice on handling medical billing problems yourself, call the toll-free number, 877-275-8765, or visit www.claims.org.)

You don't have to be confronted by a catastrophic illness, as the Burnetts were, to be overwhelmed by medical bills. And even people accustomed to dealing with numbers can be confounded by the complexity of medical-insurance claims.

Keith Briar is a stockbroker and certified public accountant in San Francisco. Briar's elderly father, who lived in Florida, became ill in 1997 and on several occasions was treated at local emergency rooms. His health deteriorated, and ultimately Briar moved his father to a nursing home in California. But by then his dad had racked up enormous medical expenses with doctors and hospitals 3,000 miles away.

"I'm a financial person, but I had no idea how the medical-insurance claims process worked," says Briar. "Every part of a procedure is billed separately, and there was no way to know what had been submitted and what had been paid." When Briar realized that he "wasn't going to become a specialist in medicare and insurance overnight," he went out and hired somebody who was: Wendy Segal of Health Insurance Claims Assistance, in nearby Foster City.

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