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. The nurse attending his first routine examination rolled her eyes at me when he launched into a diatribe about how he always did things at his old practice. 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. If perchance you do talk to a real person, they give you no useful information, and either give you another number to call or promise to return your call and never do. 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. For procedures that were covered by my insurance. On my last visit to their office for a routine blood draw, the receptionist told me, emphatically, “We can’t do that here anymore. The Feds shut us down!” She said it almost laughingly, as if it were a point of pride. If they aren’t competent enough to draw blood, imagine what their level of expertise must be in more complicated procedures. Search long and hard for another health care provider before choosing Metcare.
