Met Care

Stay as far away from the medical practitioners (?) at Metcare as you can. In the year and a half I visited these clowns I experienced levels of incompetence, inefficiency, and unresponsiveness that are hard to believe.

You have no choice in doctors; you are assigned to whoever is available (which probably means the least competent or most recently hired staff; there is a high rate of turnover, so in the unlikely event you get a doctor you like, you probably won’t keep him/her long). The doctor I was assigned to was an older gentleman, very pleasant, but he did not inspire confidence. He was uncommunicative about test results. I had to badger him to get him to tell me the numerical result of my A1C test (glycolated hemoglobin), a pretty important diagnostic for diabetics, which I am.

The staff is even worse. Trying to get a real person to talk to on the phone is a trying exercise in patience.

On one of my first visits, the staff at Metcare took a blood sample for routine testing, and sent it to a lab (Quest Diagnostics) that was not in my insurance network. The result was I was billed around $150 for tests that were clearly covered by my insurance policy. When I finally got to speak to the billing “specialist” at the DeLand facility, she told me she was unable to handle my problem and gave me a number to call for the national billing office. When I was finally able to speak to a real person at that number (again, no easy task), I spent nearly an hour on the phone (punctuated by numerous holds of 5-10 minutes) explaining the situation. Eventually, the billing representative confirmed that the billing error was Metcare’s fault, and she would resolve the issue. That’s the last I heard from Metcare, and that phone call was nearly a year ago. I continue to receive bills from Quest, threatening to turn the account over to a collection agency if I don’t pay.