The twenty-nine-dollar kit, 2016

I am writing off my usual day because the video reached my inbox this week from three people, and I owe all three the same confession. I bought this kit in 2016. It cost twenty-nine dollars and came as a PDF, and it did not have a video, because we were not yet that far along. It had a table.

The bill was Mikhail's. He had been in the hospital in Manchester for four days in the winter of 2015, and the following autumn a collection appeared on his TransUnion file for $3,140. The hospital bill had been paid. This was the anesthesiology group, which bills separately, and the figure was the amount before his insurance had touched it. The right number, which I did not know yet, was $412.

The kit told me the collection was "unverifiable." I liked the word. It sounded like something I could prove by saying it.

I mailed letter one on 3 October, certified, from the post office on the green. I mailed letter two on 17 October, as instructed, with a paragraph demanding the "method of verification." I mailed letter three on 1 November, notarized by a woman at the bank who asked me what it was for and, when I told her, said "hm" in a way I have not forgotten. All three letters had the same table: the collector's name, the account number, and my adjective.

TransUnion answered once, in the second week of November, on one page: verified. Nothing about the method, because, as Calvin explains in his piece on the calendar, I had asked for a description of a procedure that had not finished when I asked. My letters two and three were, to the bureau, one dispute sent three times, the second one arriving with "additional information" that legally gave them fifteen more days.

Here is what I did not do, and it is the whole lesson, and it took me until the following March to do it. I did not call the anesthesiology group and ask for the itemized statement. When I finally did, a young man read me the numbers over the telephone in under four minutes: billed $3,140, insurance paid $2,728, patient balance $412. He mailed it. I put it in the tin.

Then I wrote one letter. One page. Account as printed, the field ("balance"), the printed value, the correct value, the statement enclosed as Exhibit A, and a request that they correct it or delete it if the collector could not verify the figure from its own records. Certified, and then nothing, for thirty-one days. The balance was corrected. Mikhail paid the $412 to the group directly, by check, with the account number on the memo line, and the tradeline read paid within the quarter.

So, to the three people who sent me the video, and to you: I have looked at the current version and it is the same table, the same three envelopes, the same fortnight, the same notary. The only thing that has changed is the delivery: it is now free, and you are asked to leave a comment. Calvin has already written about the section number in its title, which I did not notice in 2016 because I did not know there was anything to notice.

What ten years adds is this. The kit did not fail because the bureau was dishonest. It failed because I had given the bureau nothing to forward. The statute obliges them to send what you enclose to the furnisher and to consider it; I enclosed an adjective. A caption with no photograph.

The principle: a dispute is a fact you can prove about one field, with the paper that proves it enclosed. Everything else is a letter you will be proud of for exactly fourteen days.

If you have the kit on your desk, put it in the drawer. Then call the provider, ask for the itemized statement, and wait for the paper before you write a word.