NEED TO KNOW
- A Massachusetts woman is struggling to manage more than $20,000 in medical bills for preventative rabies treatments after a bat ended up in her mouth
- Erica Kahn, 33, said the incident occurred last August after she had been laid off and lost her health insurance
- She was treated at four care locations across Arizona, Massachusetts and Colorado
A Massachusetts woman is struggling to manage more than $20,000 in medical bills after undergoing treatment for an unusual run-in with a bat on vacation.
Erica Kahn, 33, told KFF Health News the incident occurred last August while she was snapping photos of the sky in Arizona. A bat suddenly got caught between her head and the camera, then partially ended up in her mouth when she screamed.
Her father, a doctor, encouraged her to seek a series of rabies vaccinations, although she did not think the bat bit her during the seconds-long encounter.
Kahn told KFF Health News she’d recently been laid off from her biomedical engineering position, but bought a health insurance policy online the day after the bat incident to help ease the cost of the treatments, which she sought in Arizona, Massachusetts and Colorado.
Yet the company she’d bought coverage from denied payments for her care, citing a 30-day waiting period, according to the outlet.
“The required waiting period for this service has not been met,” the company said in a letter to Kahn, per KFF.
Her bills totaled about $20,749 across four treatment centers.
“I thought it must have been a mistake,” she told the outlet of the denials. “I guess I was naive.”
Since then, Kahn has gotten a new job, negotiated down a bill, set up a payment plan for another and will keep trying to appeal the rejected payments for the rest of her debt, KFF reported.
She told the outlet she regrets letting her coverage lapse after she lost her job.
“That’s a very big lesson I learned the hard way,” Kahn said.
Despite the ordeal, she tries to look at it with a sense of humor.
“I know what bats taste like now. It’s an earthy, sweet kind of flavor,” she told KFF. “It’s actually a pretty funny story — if it weren’t for the horrible medical bill that came with it.”
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