photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World File Photo

In this file photo from Jan. 5, 2019, a LifeStar air ambulance prepares to accept a patient after landing in Lawrence.

A Baldwin City man was still coping with the loss of his wife when a year and a half after her death he received a bill for $43,495 for a 35-mile emergency helicopter flight his wife took from Lawrence to Kansas City, and he fears the outstanding balance might send him into bankruptcy.

Daniel Smith’s traumatic ordeal began two years ago. His wife, Linda Joyce Smith, had just adopted a puppy, and one September morning in 2021 it woke Daniel up, needing to go outside. Daniel took the puppy out, then climbed back into bed alongside Linda. When he woke up again later, Linda was in distress.

“She was kneeling on that stool (which she needed because of the bed’s height) with one knee and had one arm on the bed and the other arm on a desk right in front of her, unresponsive,” Daniel said.

Daniel tried to talk to Linda, but she wouldn’t answer.

“Finally, I said, ‘Are you ignoring me or what?’ I got no response. So I called 911. The ambulance came. We got her out of the house and loaded in the ambulance,” Daniel said.

photo by: Contributed

Linda J. Smith

The ambulance took Linda to LMH Health, where they performed some tests. After scanning her brain, doctors told Daniel that LMH would not be able to handle Linda’s condition locally and said she needed to be flown to the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Kansas.

Daniel said the doctor gave him driving directions to KU Med, and he quickly stopped at home to make sure the dogs were OK because he expected he would be in the hospital with Linda for some time. While he was at home he got a call from another doctor at KU Med.

“I got a call from the attending (doctor) at KU who wanted verbal authorization to do a surgery. And he stressed the point that it was a life-saving surgery and it would be about two and a half hours,” Daniel said.

He said that it took him about that long to get to the Kansas City hospital, and he expected to get an update when he arrived. The hospital had already told him what room Linda was going to be in after the surgery, but when he got there, a nurse told him she was not out of surgery yet and sent him to the waiting room.

After another hour and a half the surgeon met with Daniel and provided details about the surgery.

“That two and a half hour surgery ended up taking almost four hours. She never woke up after that. I finally had to take her off life support and let her go,” Daniel said.

Linda died on Sept. 18, 2021, two weeks after being admitted to the hospital. Just a couple of months later, on Nov. 27, Daniel spent their 39th wedding anniversary without his wife.

Right after Linda’s death, Daniel was filling out forms from his Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance and Linda’s Medicare for services at LMH and KU Med.

“I filled out all the information and returned it. I believe I got one bill after that. And then, of course, I got a statement from Blue Cross where they paid their amount,” Daniel said.

The family held a final service for Linda in June of 2022 at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ottawa. Daniel said he thought that was the end of it.

“Then I never got any more bills, until this year. Late spring, I guess it was. At least 18 months, no bill, no information from anybody and then I started getting bills from the helicopter people,” Daniel said.

He said that the bills started coming two and three at a time with duplicate information and dates on them.

photo by: Contributed

A bill from Med Trans, Air Medical Transport in West plains Missouri sent to Daniel Smith for services provided to his wife Linda Smith.

“In one week, I got eight or nine bills all sent in individual envelopes,” Daniel said.

He called an attorney to try to understand why the bills were coming that way. He called his daughter, who helped him do some research and to contact Medicare to see if they had any idea why the bills were coming.

That’s when he learned that Medicare would have covered some of the helicopter bill, but only if it received notice of the bill within 12 months of the service rendered.

“When they did start coming and I was getting multiple billings, it just kind of blindsided me. Well, if you’re after your money, how come you didn’t worry about it for 18 months?” Daniel said he wondered.

Daniel said he started asking the company for an itemized bill so he could at least understand what he was being charged for.

“They charged me so many thousands of dollars to start the engine, so many thousand per mile for a 35-mile trip. And I think it was approximately $2,500 in miscellaneous charges,” Daniel said.

The bulk of the bill was $30,420 for an item listed as “Base Rate Rotor Wing” and another $10,903 for “Loaded Miles Rotor Wing,” then $954 for oxygen, $609 for ventilator use, $477 in other supplies and finally $132 for “wait time” for a grand total of $43,495.20.

Daniel said that he, with the help of an attorney, contacted the company, Med-Trans, of West Plains, Missouri, and asked it to submit the bill to Medicare, despite being outside the 12-month time frame Medicare requires. He said that his research indicated that Medicare might still cover part of the cost but Med-Trans wouldn’t submit the bill to Medicare because Linda was under Medicare Part A.

“They just flat out refused to do that, because ‘we are a part B provider, end of discussion,'” Daniel said he was told by the helicopter company.

Daniel has since been insured under Medicare Part B himself, and when he was enrolling with the help of a woman at the Senior Resource Center in Lawrence, she recommended that he contact U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran’s office.

Daniel began corresponding with Moran’s office, who asked his permission to turn his case over to the Kansas Insurance Commission. After some back-and-forth the commission was able to get the bill sent to his Blue Cross Blue Shield provider out of Illinois. He said the claim was initially rejected, because it was an out-of-state claim, but eventually the insurance provider paid the helicopter company $9,486.31, leaving a balance of $34,000.89 still owed.

Daniel said that while he is grateful that his own insurance was able to pay some of the balance down, he is still worried about the remainder and how it will affect his financial future. He said his contact at Moran’s office said that some proposed legislation could offer him some relief but such a bill had not yet been passed.

Daniel has spent his career as a truck driver. His former employer recently filed for bankruptcy, and now Daniel is out of work and facing an uncertain future. He said he hasn’t received a bill recently from the helicopter company, but that is no comfort to him.

“Considering they waited 18 months before, I don’t want to consider it swept under the carpet and then all of a sudden in another 18 months or something they start to come after me again. I want some closure on this so I know. If I get charged with that amount of money, it’s going to force me into bankruptcy,” Daniel said.

One bitter, ironic part of the whole situation is that Daniel has started receiving postcards in the mail offering him helicopter insurance.

“I had never even heard of helicopter insurance. I just kind of felt it was a little bit ironic that I started getting them (the postcards) after Linda’s situation and never got them before,” Daniel said.

While he hasn’t responded to the postcards or attended any of the informational luncheons that he has been invited to, he is considering taking out a policy.

“I am going to check into it eventually just to see what it does cost because it might be cheap insurance, if you will, after a bill like this,” Daniel said.

Linda was 74 when she died. She was one of five siblings and a mother to three children. She spent most of her career as a bookkeeper in Hutchinson before moving in 2001 to northeast Kansas and in 2006 to Baldwin City, where she worked as a school bus driver until her death.

photo by: Contributed

A family photo of Daniel Smith, left, Linda Smith, right, and one of Linda’s three children.

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to note West Plains, Missouri, as the location of Med-Trans Air Medical Transport.