I have a part time job between more steady “career” type jobs. Service industry stuff. Hours suck, not as many as promised, but the pay isn’t awful. It’s what it is. Pays the rent for now.
I get asked to clean something that “hasn’t been cleaned in years” and I agree despite it not being my job. Long story short, end up piercing my hand on a rusty piece of metal that was next to a trash can people drop food in, so it was dirty too. Smallest pierce in the world, but it drew blood. My first thought, get a fucking tetanus shot, which my managers agreed. Went to CVS, got the shot, paid $75 out of pocket. Nobody coached me up on the L&I process, got all this done within about 90 minutes of it happening. Not much research time. Call out sick the next day as the shot kicked my ass.
So, I get in touch with L&I and they tell me I needed to go to an urgent care to be told I needed the tetanus shot. Something other managers said they would have informed me of. My bad, but also, I didn’t know and was just worried and wanted it done ASAP. Fine. L&I tells me I can still go to urgent care and get it looked at to file the claim and get reimbursed for the $75 for the shot. So I go, and they have me fill out the paperwork and tell me if it’s an L&I claim I won’t be charged.
Get something today that looks like junk mail, but I open it. Thank god. $415 bill from urgent care. Including an $80 charge to file the L&I claim. So now I gotta call the urgent care and L&I tomorrow. Case is still pending, but the person I saw at urgent care said it was for sure 100% a case where I should get the shot, so I hope it’s a slam dunk in that case.
I assume my BEST case scenario is that I have to pay this urgent care thing myself, like I did my tetanus shot, and then after L&I approves me I’ll submit the receipts and they’ll hopefully reimburse me for the whole cost of everything. Likely in a check that will probably arrive after I have to pay the credit card balance this urgent care charge will be on?
Thankfully I keep a very low balance on my cards and have a big credit limit, so if I have to pay this myself and get reimbursed it’ll just be a small pain in the ass. Move some savings to pay the extra charges on the card. But there’s zero reason any of this should be on my plate even short term. Send the bill to L&I and if it comes out that I’m just a scammer, then bill me. But if it’s going in my favor, let it sit in a fucking limbo and never send me a damn bill.
Talked to a couple coworkers who are worse with money and don’t have credit cards. All of them agreed they couldn’t have paid for the $75 tetanus shot so they’d have been out of luck. This (hopefully) temporary urgent care charge would cause them to have a total mental break down. I can’t imagine how many people skip things like that simply cause they can’t afford it even if they know it’ll be reimbursed. And boy, am I gonna lose it if L&I doesn’t cover this trip they sent me on.
Honest to God, when I showed up and told work I paid for the shot, they should have just asked for the receipt and popped open the till and paid me and put an end to it.